Latter-day iconoclasts take note
“The daily newspaper unquestionably has its use, but about eight days a week it is an insufferable damn-nuisance. A man may get himself covered with honor an inch thick and have gilt-edge glory plastered on him with a trowel, and the chances are that the newspapers will never notice him, or if they do will accord him a three-line paragraph tucked away among the ads; but let him be accused of some heinous crime, or his wife be caught philandering with some other fellow, and forthwith he is given a front-page 'spread' with headlines that would scare a cable-car.”
—William Cowper Brann (1855-1898), editor of The Iconoclast, briefly the nation’s most controversial magazine, with a national circulation of a quarter-million. An enraged reader shot and, er, “deleted” Brann on the streets of Waco, Texas, on April Fool’s Day, 1898.
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