Read the passage given below and then answer the questions given below the passage.

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust. The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity. Criminality was blamed on the suggestive effects of lurid crime reports. And many writers concluded that the newspaper would soon kill off the book and imaginative literature altogether.
These dismal appraisals yielded a series of fiercely pessimistic novels of journalism by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, the Goncourt brothers and Guy de Maupassant. Each portrayed the press as a _____ and _________ behemoth that was devouring art and culture within its predatory maw. ‘Newspapers are an evil,’ as one world-weary author remarks in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-43). Another describes newspaper offices as ‘whorehouses of thought’, anticipating the degradation of the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, from idealistic young poet to unscrupulous hack as he falls for a glamorous courtesan.
But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.
Novels, short stories, poetry and criticism, along with much whimsical blather, filled up pages largely devoid of hard political news (due to extensive censorship) and proved an ideal means of attracting readers. Since books and theatre seldom earned a decent income, most writers reluctantly turned to the burgeoning marketplace of newspapers and magazines. That fraught relationship is summed up in a quip from Gustave Flaubert’s posthumously published compendium of contemporary fatuity, the Dictionary of Received Ideas (1910): ‘Newspapers – Can’t live without them, but thunder against.’ Writer-journalists such as Balzac and Maupassant railed against the world from whence they came.
Their fictional denunciations of journalistic skullduggery and philistinism were hardly without basis. For the French press was sustained by wholesale bribery. One leading editor even declared that he was not happy unless every line of his newspaper had been bought and paid for. Novels of journalism shed murky light on that otherwise hidden world of venality (which reporters and editorialists were naturally loath to confront).
But the repetitive, self-pitying trope, inaugurated by Balzac, equating journalism with prostitution itself obscured the complexities of literary-journalistic exchange. Newspapers were at once a meretricious medium and a forum for creative innovation. During the second half of the 19th century, some modernist writers began to reckon with that duality, toning down the anti-journalistic thunder and taking a more nuanced and self-conscious approach to the rise of mass press. As we, in turn, struggle to come to terms with the tumultuous proliferation of new media, that spirit of ambivalent openness offers timely lessons. The French modernists show us how to carve out space for artistic expression within dominant media without being dominated by them.