Education Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

There is nostalgia in Kapuscinski's line, but it’s the austere kind that knows nostalgia can lie. “Readership was high, and very attentive” sounds like a compliment to an earlier public, yet the phrasing carries a journalist’s unease: attention wasn’t a virtue so much as a condition imposed by scarcity. When the press is “people’s only source of knowledge about the world,” the newspaper stops being a product and becomes infrastructure. You read it the way you check the weather before leaving the house: not out of leisure, but out of need.

Kapuscinski came of age reporting across the Cold War and the postcolonial world, where information shortages were often engineered. The sentence nods to state monopolies, limited broadcast reach, censorship, and the sheer logistical difficulty of getting news across borders. “Only source” is the tell. It flatters the press while quietly indicting the environments that made such dependence possible. High readership isn’t automatically a democratic health metric; it can be the footprint of constrained choice.

The subtext also lands as a rebuke to the contemporary attention economy. Today’s crisis is abundance: too many feeds, too many narratives, too much incentive to treat “the world” as content. Kapuscinski implies a time when the stakes of journalism were clearer because the pipeline was narrower. That clarity is double-edged: it made reporters indispensable, and it made their failures - bias, omission, manipulation - disproportionately consequential. The line works because it romanticizes focus while warning what focus cost: pluralism, verification by competition, and the ordinary freedom to ignore the news.