What happened? One of the pillar institutions of this nation is viewed as trash by many. The media gets little respect from anyone on either side.

 

My thought - the biggest step to downfall of our media is technology. Survival for today's media is driven by revenue generated online. It is so competitive that they need to create headlines to get hits and generate revenue. Stories are not vetted. If one site creates a headline that is getting hits, it becomes a race to repost the headline and grab those hits. No research necessary.

 

The second part of this is cable TV. "News" stations were created to hit certain demographics. These stations then pander to the demographic that gets their advertisers to pay.

 

What else? Where is social media in the mix?

Cable news that was 24/7 was the beginning of the downfall.

Cable news that was 24/7 was the beginning of the downfall.

 

If we really want to go back to the roots, Ted Koppel's night time news show that I believe started with the Iran hostage crisis. That is where the news show growth started.

The truth became secondary to views and ratings, the race to be first trumps all. Now it's all tabloid fodder. For entertainment purposes only.

If we really want to go back to the roots, Ted Koppel's night time news show that I believe started with the Iran hostage crisis. That is where the news show growth started.

 

News Shows were okay but when the monster of 24/7 had to be fed, the journalistic integrity of fact checking took a back seat to producing mass product.

Not to mention Blogs that constantly challenge facts with spin. Mainstream media then tried to incorporate the same for viewership.

 

IMO, a lot of this is at the feet of guys like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olberman.

For better or worse the internet has played a major role.

 

The "media" used to be the gatekeeper to information about what was happening in the world. By that I mean it you wanted to know what was going on you had to rely on traditional media to get the information. That gave the media a lot more power, but everyone was working from the same information.

 

That's not the case anymore. Information is widely available, but it's also repackaged into thousands of different narratives and we tend to consume those we like.

 

That's how you end up with people having all this information at their fingertips but substantively knowing less. And that's how you end up with people having no sense of what's true and what isn't, so we rely on the narrative we like best instead. A conversation between someone who consumes only RedState and someone who consumes only ThinkProgress can go nowhere.

 

Social media has amplified this effect tenfold. There are no gates to be kept any longer. Everyone has their very own miniature media platform where they can pump out their own narratives. And all this is currated and shoved in front of our faces, we don't even have to look for it.

 

The end result is truthiness instead of truth. We believe the things that make us feel good, whether they are accurate or not. It turns us into sports fans where we are entertained by the competition and cheering for our side.

 

Someone trying to check the veracity of a claim has to wade through a sea of noise and contradicting opinions that they may as well give up.

For as long as I remember, the news media has never been trustworthy. The advent of cable news channels led to the end of the decades long monopoly that liberals had enjoyed. Most Americans trusted the three major networks' slant on the news because there was no dissenting voice. The same thing was true of the print media. Most major daily newspapers reported with a liberal slant, just as they do today, and their sales and circulation numbers were great because they had little competition.

 

The development of the internet and the creation of the Fox News Channel led to the end of liberals' domination of the media. Technology and the diversification of news coverage saved our "free press." Had the liberal monopoly of news coverage continued unabated, this country would have been much worse off than it is now. The only difference would have been that fewer people would have realized their predicament.

 

While I credit Fox News for helping break the news monopoly in this country, I am no fan of the network. During the Republican primaries, FNC could have easily been mistaken for the Trump media machine. Unfortunately, FNC is the GOP's answer to MSNBC and CNN in the case of political news coverage.

 

It would be great to have one great big, infallible source of news that all of us could trust, but that is not possible, and it has never been possible. The next best thing is to have news organizations compete with one another and allow consumers to sort out fact from fiction - and that is the system that is still evolving.

I remember Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley etc. anchoring the evening network newscasts. Granted my memory is sketchy but I don't recall ever being able to determine their political bent while watching them. The same isn't true of Scott Pelle, Lester Holt or whoever is the current ABC anchor.

 

I remember watching Walter Cronkite tear up when the moon landing happened in 1969. The current batch would be lamenting how much money had been wasted going to the moon, how wrong it was to put Americans in a perilous situation like that and decrying the pollution happening because of man's presence on the surface of the moon.

Not to mention Blogs that constantly challenge facts with spin. Mainstream media then tried to incorporate the same for viewership.

 

IMO, a lot of this is at the feet of guys like Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olberman.

 

Huh? Limbaugh makes no bones about the fact he is a conservative and does not claim to be an "unbiased reporter". While I absolutely detest Olberman, he does not claim to be neutral either. That is very different than when supposed neutral new reporters openly root for Obama (80% or so) and openly root against Trump (same 80% or so).

Huh? Limbaugh makes no bones about the fact he is a conservative and does not claim to be an "unbiased reporter". While I absolutely detest Olberman, he does not claim to be neutral either. That is very different than when supposed neutral new reporters openly root for Obama (80% or so) and openly root against Trump (same 80% or so).

 

People take what both say as the gospel, and neither open their broadcast or podcast with a disclaimer that 90% of what they say is spin.

Some very good points on this thread.

Cable news that was 24/7 was the beginning of the downfall.

 

This! It all started with the 24/7 cycle. It's what pushed symbolism over substance IMO. Anything and everything to get ratings. Truth, integrity, honesty, principals and ethics are gone.

This! It all started with the 24/7 cycle. It's what pushed symbolism over substance IMO. Anything and everything to get ratings. Truth, integrity, honesty, principals and ethics are gone.

The media was not engaged in truth, integrity, honesty, principles, or ethics before the 24/7 news cycle emerged - they were just singing from the same sheet of music. Liberals were using the media to undermine the Vietnam War effort before Ted Turner bought his first TV station.

 

The Cuban missile crisis is another example of dishonest media coverage. The Kennedy administration struck a deal with the Soviets to withdraw American nuclear armed missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing nuclear missiles from Cuba. As far as the American public knew, JFK took a courageous stand by demanding the removal of missiles from Cuba and the Soviets blinked - nuclear war was averted.

 

In reality, the country had never been on the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviets. That is a version of history still pushed by liberals but it was never true. I remember most Americans watching one of the three commercial American TV networks to learn whether the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were going to start launching missiles at each other. Most Americans were genuinely scared, but the issue had already been resolved. However, the Kennedy administration still needed a political win to help people forget the Bay of Pigs disaster. The media gave him that win.

 

When liberals had a near monopoly on news organizations, they determined what was fit to print or show. Consequently, the image of JFK as a devoted family man saturated the airwaves, despite the fact that many in the media knew that Kennedy was a serial adulterer.

 

I prefer a free press over a media that belongs to a political movement.

Television in the 20th Century was a monolith that created something no one had ever seen before.

 

Truth is that newspapers were never unbiased and that only Watergate made people pretend that neutrality was important.

 

In 18th and 19th Century America, major cities had several newspapers, geared specifically toward every party and political movement. Louisville alone had more newspapers than could be named, including more than one owned by the Bingham family themselves. There was a German Catholic newspaper, a newspaper directed to news that affected the black community, and a popular paper dedicated to the temperance movement.

 

My own position has always been to consume as much as I can and discern what I might.