The Economist

“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington,” was Noel Coward‘s advise. Nowadays young Miss Worthington would be wise to avoid newsrooms, publishing offices, film sets and television studios as well.

The Anglo-American world has seldom heard so many complaints about the quality of books, television programmes and films. As a business, too, the media industry is in wretched shape, its leading companies crippled by debt, rapacity or fraud; sometimes — as with those run the late Robert Maxwell — a combination of all three.

Each day it seems another newspaper or magazine is closed, a television schedule trimmed, the bankruptcy lawyers summoned…

February, 1992