Sunlight is the best disinfectant

And other lies we tell ourselves in the digital age

Empathy means
laying yourself down
in someone else’s chalk lines
and snapping a photo.

—Solmaz Sharif

I’m old enough to remember how journalists, various academics and analysts made much of the fact that the Vietnam War was “the first televised war,” that it happened “in people’s lounge rooms” and that this proximity—the visceral reality of death and destruction playing out on people’s television screens—increased pressure on the US government to bring the war to an end.

Those were the days.

In many ways, that war coverage, as well the Washington Post’s work on Watergate, defined several generation’s understanding of what journalism should be, while entrenching the hard-bitten, trustworthy, masculine image of journalists themselves in the public’s mind, elevating the likes of Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to mythical status.

Those two stories defined an era of news that was unchallenged in its views and interpretations, singular moments collectively experienced and centrali…