This, to be honest, is where I stopped reading. What does it even mean? "In theory", as opposed to "in practice"? What kind of truth is that? If something differs between theory and practice, it's not a matter of truth, but of utility, and we have abandoned the argument that truth is indispensible, in favor of a hard-eyed reckoning of how much truth we will tolerate. I will not join you on that slippery slope.
This, to be honest, is where I stopped reading. What does it even mean?...--Romulus
That may be the problem.
If you read the rest of the argument, maybe you would have seen where I was going.
Walter Lippmann, the 20th-century American columnist, wrote, "A free press is not a privilege, but an organic necessity in a great society." True in theory. True even in Lippmann's quaint mid-20th-century America, perhaps. But patently false in this postmodern era of the bubbas and the Pinches.
In addition, Shut down the N Y Times. - ["emphasis added"]