After reaching its (21) in 1990s, journalism seems to be cast in bleak and grim prospects. We are enduring the worst (22) in the advertising market since at least the 1950s. Yet, I am (23) about the future of journalism. Journalism is the business of bringing information and opinion about public affairs to a mass audience. So long as the people want to know the world around, they will want (24) . In fact, the growth of journalism is rapid and all (25) than any change since the advent of cheap (26) , newspaper, radio or other mass media. However, contrasts are obvious. Over the past decade and a half, many newsmagazines are dying, but the (27) , also a news magazine, flourishes. The TV networks are (28) . The American networks’ evening programs have only a little more than half the audience they had a decade ago. Yet there is more and better news and information program available to North American viewers than ever before. The daily newspapers are losing their readers. And yet, the newspaper readers have (29) to almost every title in the world instantaneously, either free or at a lower cost. Journalists feel that cost-conscious (30) are squeezing their ability to do serious and in-depth and unusual work. But we can check into the vast on-line network of bloggers and learn from somebody directly on the spot more facts than even the most lavishly funded reporter would ever tell me. So if these are the worst of times, they are also the best of times.
The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form in conduct. The cultured man or the ideal educated man is not necessarily one who is well-read or learned, but one who likes and dislikes the right things. To know what to love and what to hate is to have taste in knowledge. (81) I have met such persons, and found that there was no topic that might come up in the course of the conversation concerning which they did not have some facts or figures to produce, but whose points of view were appalling. Such persons have erudition (the quality of being knowledgeable), but no discernment or taste. Erudition is a mere matter of stuffing facts or information, while taste or discernment is a matter of artistic judgment. (82) In speaking of a scholar, the Chinese generally distinguish between a man’s scholarship, conduct, and taste or discernment. This is particularly so with regard to historians; a book of history may be written with the most thorough scholarship, yet be totally lacking in insight or discernment, and in the judgment or interpretation of persons and events in history, the author may show no originality or depth of understanding. Such a person, we say, has no taste in knowledge. To be well-informed, or to accumulate facts and details, is the easiest of all things. (83)There are many facts in a given historical period that can be easily stuffed into our mind, but discernment in the selection of significant facts is a vastly more difficult thing and depends upon one’s point of view. An educated man, therefore, is one who has the right loves and hatreds. This we call taste, and with taste comes charm. (84)Now to have taste or discernment requires a capacity for thinking things through to the bottom, an independence of judgment, and an unwillingness to be knocked down by any form of fraud, social, political, literary, artistic or academic. There is no doubt that we are surrounded in our aduh life with a wealth of frauds: fame frauds, wealth frauds, patriotic frauds, political frauds, religious frauds and fraud poets, fraud artists, fraud dictators and fraud psychologists. When a psychoanalyst tells us that the performing of the functions of the bowels during childhood has a definite connection or that constipation leads to stinginess of character, all that a man with taste can do is to feel amused. (85)When a man is wrong, he is wrong, and there is no need for one to be impressed and overawed by a great name or by the number of books that he has read and we haven’t.