Daily Inspiration Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

Lapham slips the knife in with a genteel smile. The line is built like a compliment to journalism and ends as an indictment of its audience: we have come to treat news as a product category where “entertaining” is the default feature and “true” is an optional upgrade. The joke works because the second clause isn’t actually unreasonable on its face. Of course people should expect journalism to be true. Lapham’s point is that, culturally, we no longer do.

The subtext is about incentives. An industry that must compete in the attention economy gets measured in clicks, ratings, and virality; “entertaining” becomes the currency that keeps the lights on. In that environment, truth turns into a branding claim - invoked when convenient, litigated when harmful, abandoned when boring. Lapham isn’t just scolding reporters for sensationalism; he’s describing the bargain the public has made with itself. We want the cognitive sugar rush of a story that flatters our priors, moves fast, and lands clean moral punches. We also want the dignity of believing we are informed citizens. Those desires conflict, and the quote exposes the hypocrisy with a crisp turn: expecting both is framed as “too much.”

Context matters: Lapham came up in an era when magazine editors still saw themselves as curators of a public record, not merely managers of engagement. His cynicism is less nostalgia than warning. When entertainment becomes the primary test, truth doesn’t just suffer; it becomes suspect - another “take,” another tribe’s content.