Sentence:  From another point of view, it was a place without a soul. The well-to-do had hearts of stone; the rich were brutally bumptious; the <WSD>Press</WSD>, the Municipality, all the public men, were ridiculously, vaingloriously self-satisfied. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A collective term for the print-based media (both the people and the newspapers).