I watched a making-of featurette at the end of State of Play.
Helen Mirren said reporters--I think she called them
journalists--believed they belonged to a noble profession.
They were serving the public. Serving the culture.
The corporatization of the industry was doing to them,
and, unnoticed, or unreported on, in their pages,
to the culture, what the privatization of Homeland Security
was doing to police work, intelligence, law enforcement,
and the judiciary. I say that's happening to literature,
but who do I tell it to? Where do I say it?
Midas has ass's ears. Tell it to a hole in the ground.
Maybe the reeds will whisper it, in breezes.
Will sussurate. Go in a cave
and think one true thought.