Sports aren’t war though. Sports are celebrity. Arguably sports was what got western culture into the cult of celebrity, it really started with the gladiators. Opera isn’t popular anymore, back when it was popular opera singers were massive celebrities, complete with divorces and sex scandals and all the other trashy celebrity culture we have today. I’m not bringing opera into anything, I’m pointing out that opera was already in that world. The cult of celebrity has extremely deep roots that show your complaint about it being something “new” are silly and ill-informed.
Back then there might be an article in the back of the paper about that celebrity, maybe just a paragraph. Today there are many 24-hour TV channels. People are glued to celebrity worship today like they could never be before
What you are managing to do is to miss the conversation entirely, the feminization of news and the creation of a adultfemale/femaleteen/celebrity culture where the news is dominated by celebrity and female interests from fashion to health to human interest angles in everything, in other words anything but the hard news that men need and want.
Even war and foreign affairs and science has to be written to female sensibilities when it comes up, the “human” angle, how it affects children, not our security.
Almost all mainstream media is now a version of women’s magazines - celeb gossip & neurotic sensationalism and what hasn’t totally converted, has diluted itself.
What changed was newspapers ending their women’s section as ‘sexist” and as a “pink ghetto” to keep it from diluting, or contaminating the hard news, they started affirmative action to hire females and blacks to write for the people who were not the number one consumers of newspapers, what they got out of it, was that they lost their hard news audience, and the females and blacks didn’t become newspaper readers to replace them, the same happened to news magazines.
There was a time when men would religiously watch the black and white network news, now it is useless, my guess is that this minor celebrity dominated network news while our serious issues were ignored.