Adam Cohen, in the NYT (Aug. 22, 2004):

In his time at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau periodically returned to Concord, Mass., and when he did, the village seemed to him like a "great news room." After days alone, he found himself surrounded by gossip on all sides, from the idle talk of his neighbors to the frivolous reports in the newspapers. Thoreau was not immune to the appeal of gossip, which he saw as "really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs." But he worried that society was being dulled by its fascination with trivial events. "Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap after dinner," Thoreau lamented, "but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 'What's the news?' "

"Walden" is, to use one of Thoreau's favorite images, a bottomless pond. Readers can always dive into it again, and find something new. Thoreau's lyrical account of his two years, two months, and two days living in a simple shack by a pond was published 150 years ago this month, yet it speaks directly to the information age. Buried in its accounts of planting bean fields and staring out at the night sky is some remarkably prescient media criticism. Thoreau could not have imagined television news shows endlessly yammering about Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson, or newsstands jammed with accounts of celebrity breakups. But he had a dead-on sense of how they could undermine the human spirit and lead the nation astray....

Much of "Walden" is Thoreau's account of how he stripped life down to its essentials. For a book about returning to the garden, however, it is oddly preoccupied with Thoreau's thoughts about communications. The third chapter, "Reading," is his extended complaint that Americans are not reading the best books. It includes a scathing attack on the Hollywood of the day, cheap novels that offered up "the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before."

But it is Thoreau's views on news that have the most contemporary feel. He believed that sensationalist newspaper articles - the mid-19th century equivalent of local television news - were a distraction. "If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned we never need read of another," he writes. "If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

Thoreau was by no means opposed to news consumption, but he believed society should focus intently on the news that mattered. A few days before John Brown was hanged for leading his antislavery insurrection in Harpers Ferry, Va., Thoreau wrote in his journal that he had been "absorbed of late in Captain Brown's fate" and that it surprised him to see other people "going about their affairs indifferent." He believed in the importance of information not merely to improve the mind, but as a guide to action. He disavowed organized reform movements. "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good," he wrote in "Walden," "I should run for my life." But he was, in fact, not only keeping up with the great moral causes of his day; he was fighting for them.

He crusaded for John Brown and helped lead slaves to freedom on the underground railroad. In "Civil Disobedience," he tells the well-known story of being thrown in jail for refusing, in protest of slavery and the war against Mexico, to pay his poll tax.

Thoreau would be disturbed by today's endless flood of celebrity bulletins and made-for-cable-TV courtroom face-offs not because he thought gossip was inherently wrong, but because of what it was distracting America from. He missed the opportunity to deplore the fact that people who can rattle off the details of the voting in "American Idol" know little about the presidential campaign, and that the Laci Peterson killing gets more attention than North Korea's nuclear program. But he anticipated, long before the 24-hour news cycle and cellphones, that in modern America the problem might well be not too little access to information, but too much. "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas," he writes in "Walden," "but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."