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I was a newsman in Canadian radio but had enough by 1993. My gradual epiphany, if there is such a thing, started with Reagan’s election, before which we were told the world would end. Then he made it better but was fought all the way. Kinda like President Trump now, but not as bad.
I was at the Canadian war museum a couple of weeks back and they have a “Cold War ending” display with Gorbachev looking warm and fuzzy and Reagan and Thatcher with typically-chosen facial expressions. They never change.
The start - - the turning point for mainstream Americans - - was the Drudge Report... Whitewater - Dan Rather and FreeRepublic.
It's gotten "progressively" worse.
Johnson, but especially Clinton
I don’t recall Douglas Edwards being biased, but Uncle Walter surely was!
1974 - the tag team of Sam Donaldson, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw day after day going after Nixon - perhaps even more disgusting than what’s happening to Trump today because it was unprecedented and unapologetic.....
There is not a date that the press became so fake. And some may say it was somewhat fake no matter how far you go back. But modern day press was formed as early as the 1990’s when media started to lose money. Cable TV news started to take viewers away from TV and newspapers. The internet exacerbated the problem as the media started to lose viewers.
During this time the funding for newsrooms dropped to the bare bones. Reporters were replaced by news feed writers who simply took AP news feeds and rewrote them to look like local reporting. Today most news rooms only have a small hand full of reporters, not the large news rooms you see in movies like All the President’s Men. In the current news rooms there are some reporters who rarely leave their office. And several copy writers. And in many cases reporters just work from home, many are paid by the story.
Now add that to today’s situation as the readers have left newspapers. And viewers have stopped watching broadcast TV in favor of cable. But now the cable companies are losing audiences to cord cutters. The cable companies who owned CNN and MSNBC used live broadcasts to retain audiences. Sports was a big part of that, as was reality TV. But a big part of live, much watch TV are the news channels including Fox. They decided that the best news, fastest, most honest and complete was not important. What was important was to be “must watch TV”. So they skewed their news to get the most sensationalism possible. And to get the most partisan news possible. Non partisan news can be produced by anybody. And the audience is not loyal. But partisan news develops a very loyal audience which grows in size depending on how well the views of the news channel matches those of the potential audience. The same approach was applied to the remaining newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
So now we are not watching news. We are watching propaganda, cheaply produced in order to produce the largest audience. And the fact that it is so cheap to produce means that billionaires are influencing the content as most large media don’t cost any more than a pro football team.
So, as
I think during the Clinton Presidency. The networks announce they would no longer investigate stories.
It started with Walter Cronkite back in the sixties and became worse year by year.
Someone should have noticed during Reagan. CNN was owned by idiot Ted Turner who married Hanoi Jane. So this goes back a ways. Fox News and then Republican hatred by the media blew the lid. Took till Trump to become the most clear.
I should add that a defining year was 1987, 30 years ago. The Bork confirmation and Iran Contra hearings, plus the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. All three sent the left overboard.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/pulitzer-winning-lies/article/4040
Out in the open leftist? I’d say the 60’s is when they took a hard left and sided with the hippies screaming at the American servicemen coming back from Vietnam.
Blatant in your face leftist? 2015 Presidential election is when the last facade fell from the thin veneer of their pretend unbiased claim.
Walter Cronkite 1969. Months after the truth of the Tet Offensive became apparent
Reaffirmed during the coverage of Watergate 1972
It was obvious the grey lady and alphabet news had an agenda that was anti-American
It started when Walter Cronkite decided to start reporting the Viet Nam war was lost. I was a kid listening to the news when he essentially said that. I thought, “Holy smoke, he just destroyed years of effort.”
When the people running newsrooms worried more about how costs were contained covering a story rather than getting the facts straight.
Once upon a time, the New York Times had a managing editor who could point out a calculus error to Einstein. Today’s NYT possesses no one of that caliber. Most likely the “journalists” work in the field because they hate math. Despise it. Never mind the exposure to how dead white males like Newton and Leibniz thought.
IMO, today’s “journalism” is about me, me, me. That’s when it’s not hyperventilating about the weather, or elevating drivel to the level of news. Facts and logical thought fall behind priorities like dumbing down articles and scripts, (”That’s too complicated” and “What do women want”) surfing Pintrest while at work, checking fantasy league results, and politicking with the boss to get a better shift.
We don’t really have any newspapers or TV news today. We have “news theater” posing as “objective journalism.” The internet has produced some good work, but at the expense of getting paid enough to make a living.
My $0.02.