90%+ of most press Rooms are democrat party activists. They systematically alienate half the market with their bad reporting and propagandizing. Even democrat voters don’t trust the crap they read in the liberal papers anymore.
That’s the same time the MBA’s (Master of Business Administration) starting infiltrating banking. Up until then, a lot of bankers got their educations in-house. Everything switched to the bottom line ONLY and being a good citizen of the local community fell away.
It is the college education that, from that time on, has taken the goodness out of a lot of professions. No more working your way up from the mailroom, etc. No more human kindness or respect for tradition and the wisdom of experience.
Things were pretty much the same in the sixties.
bup
The readership of the American newspaper was middle-class, patriotic, churchgoing, optimistic. Along came these guys (and, subsequently gals) from Columbia U. and Berkeley to tell readers just how morally burdened and ripe for reform their country was. It wasn't precisely what the customers wanted to hear. In fact, it was the opposite of what they wanted to hear.
Fascinating, and quite similar to what we've been discussing on FR for some time now. Good to hear it from an inside source.
It should be no surprise that young people trained to regard the government from a top-down, dole-to-the-proles model should think of their own profession that way. To them the customer is going to get what's good for him, not what he wants. At some point they started to take seriously the old "comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" journalistic saw, which is fine so long as you remember that the "comfortable" here is the paying customer.
This mindset leads directly to a demand - so far muted but very definitely out there - for government subsidies for failing newspapers, predicated on the fallacious premise that their function is too important for them to be allowed to fail. These people are serving something other than the customer, it's as simple as that, and it is a lesson that is not new to the newspaper business but has been re-learned over and over again. Rupert Murdoch created an empire off it.
And that's what I think is likely to be the outcome this time around that same old block. There will continue to be successful newspapers, it's just that they will be local, responsive to the customer, and focused on something other than changing the world through propaganda. They won't pay very well (they never did), will be run by non-college-degreed people who, knowing their own inadequacies, will rekindle the art of researching the topic before committing it to print. Nothing new here.
What the journalistic world needs, in short, is far less celebrity and far more humility. And it's going to get them both, the hard way.