What a mess! Sensation follows upon sensation, each report is more spectacular than the last....

The man in the street, swallowing everything he is told, listens to these fables, taking them at their face value, and blindly following the swindlers who try to divert “public” attention with exactly the kind of thing that serves their interest. The man in the street does not suspect that he is being led by the nose, and that the ringing phrases about “patriotism”, “the country’s honour and prestige” and “the Concert of Great Powers” are a deliberate attempt to cover up the machinations of financial swindlers and all sorts of capitalist adventurers. The sensational reports cooked up daily by the big bourgeois newspapers, whose occupation it is to sell the “latest” and the “most exciting” news at a profit, are designed specifically to distract the attention of the crowd from the really important questions and the real background of “high” politics.

V. Lenin