The items in the daily press are totally 
discontinuous and totally unconnected. The only 
unifying feature of the press is the dateline. 
Through that dateline the reader must go, as Alice 
went, “through the looking glass.” If it is not 
today’s line, he is involved in a world of items which 
he, the reader of a detective story, makes a plot.

Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the  
Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting , (New 
York, 1968), p. 251.