News IS entertaining !!

[klr]

Didn't, he was away from Rome the day it happened...

How convenient to be in Antium when the fire broke out. Nero was also conveniently absent when his mother died of poisoning. He was not very good friends with her when she campaigned to replace him as emperor with his stepbrother who coincidentally also died when Nero was elsewhere - the day before he was old enough to succeed him.

I'm not saying Nero arranged the burning of Rome. It's just that we have insufficient information to decide one way or another. All surviving sources we have, by Cassius Dio, Suetonius and Tacitus, are secondary. Primary accounts by the likes of Fabius Rusticus, Cluvius Rufus and Pliny the Elder, if they ever existed, are missing now. At any rate, we wouldn't know how truthful they might have been. The most we can say concerns motive. Nero had plans drawn up for a new, more beautiful Rome (including his new palace, the golden house covering somewhere between 100 and 300 acres of the now vacated area) before the fire. Not conclusive, I know, but what else do we have to go on?

As for news being entertaining, a few decades ago there were the hard hitters like Walter Cronkite in the USA. Now that nation's network headhunts comedians to host their current affairs and news programmes. Right now Jon Stewart is being asked to host Meet the Press.

It's very hard to imagine anyone else becoming so prominent and respected like Cronkite in the future. Too many news sources, too much emphasis on instant news, in-your-face reporting, sensationalism ...