Patricia Vaccarino

The key to understanding people and the world around us begins with education. One way to learn about the world is by developing a love of books. Each month, we profile a library. Large, small, urban, rural, post-modern, quaint or neo-classic; do you have a library that you love? Tell us about it. This month, Patricia Vaccarino writes about the granddaddy of all libraries on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in New York City.

With the widening gap between the mega wealthy and everyone else, it is logical to conclude that much of the soft news that is reported in the media is placed there by people who can afford to pay the high price of P.R. There is no hard data to support this contention, but it is plausible that it is the wealthy among us—corporations, organizations, families, and individuals—who are paying for the services of an estimated 800,000 professional P.R. practitioners. If it is the rich who are paying for the legions of P.R. consultants and P.R. firms, then it can be unequivocally stated that the media has become increasingly the playground of the rich.