Robert Hughes, who died yesterday at the age of 74, was most famous for his art criticism, much of which he wrote for Time, and his history of Australia, The Fatal Shore.
In his excellent memoir, Things I Didn't Know, published in 2006, Hughes wrote of his bosses at Time: "Instead of keeping their heads they panicked and decided to try and compete with the Internet and TV, to go way down on the scale of intelligence, to embark on a policy of cretinous impressionism."
It was a precise assessment of the recent history of journalism.
