Amid Tony Blair’s excoriation, I thought I’d dig up something from 1914 by H.L.Mencken. It puts, rather more eloquently than some commentators, the case for the media.

Our most serious problems, it must be plain, have been solved orgiastically, and to the tune of deafening newspaper urging and clamour.

Men have been washed into office on waves of emotion, and washed out again in the same manner.

Measures and policies have been determined by indignation far more often than by cold reason. But is the net result evil?

Is there even any permanent damage from those debauches of sentiment in which the newspapers have acted insincerely, unintelligently, with no thought save for the show itself?

I doubt it. The effect of their long and melodramatic chase of bosses is an undoubted improvement in our whole governmental method.

The boss of today is not an envied first citizen, but a criminal constantly on trial.

…Elections are no longer boldly stolen; the humblest citizen may go to the polls in safety and cast his vote honestly; the machine grows less dangerous year by year; perhaps it is already less dangerous than a camorra of utopian and dehumanized reformers would be. We begin to develop an official morality which actually rises above our private morality.

[Newspapers] have libelled and lynched the police — but the police are the better for it.

They have represented salicylic acid as an elder brother to bi-chloride of mercury — but we are poisoned less than we used to be.

They have lifted the plain people to frenzies of senseless terror over drinking-cups and neighbours with coughs — but the death-rate from tuberculosis declines.

…The way of ethical progress is not straight. It describes, to risk a mathematical pun, a sort of drunken hyperbola. But if we thus move onward and upward by leaps and bounces, it is certainly better than not moving at all. Each time, perhaps, we slip back, but each time we stop at a higher level.

The defence rests, your honour.