Every year, around this time, I'm in the UK doing family history research... among other things!
Anyway, at some stage during each visit, I will be reading a newspaper article from the late 1700s or early to mid 1800s. This was before the days when photographs became common in newspapers, but you wouldn't know it from the way the journalists of the era described the events they were reporting.
Using nothing but words, they could produce a very clear picture of the event in the reader's mind. I found that it was like being there myself! The prose, the turn of phrase and even the now rather dated expressions of the era produced, for me, a clearer idea of the particular event than is seen in newspapers today, even WITH photos.
I think that the media lost a vital component of its' craft when it stopped using real words to describe real events so succintly.
Maybe the reporters were more "worldly" in those days? Or maybe they simply did their homework on each event? They certainly had a control of the English language that we never see these days, more's the pity.