Originally Posted by
IMPress Polly
I think that's substantially true. I also think that two other developments preceding general internet access have been factors in the quality decline in mainstream American journalism in recent decades:
1) The founding of CNN in 1980, which was the first 24-hour news network. It was the only one at the time, which is why it was simply named the Cable News Network. This is where the necessity of constant, real-time updates to stories, and constant need of new material, first came into the picture. Before CNN, it was the evening broadcast on the your station(s) and that was it. It was an inevitable development really. It ran parallel to the ascendancy of cable TV itself.
2) The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. This was a policy established during the Truman presidency that required broadcasters to present more than one perspective on controversial public issues. It was repealed in 1987 under Ronald Reagan, in turn enabling first the rise of what we know today as conservative talk radio, and then of newer, more politically polar cable news outlets like Fox News and MSNBC against which the more straightforward and neutral CNN, as well local news broadcasts, now had to compete.
When you then add the popularization of the internet around the turn of the century, and of social medias around 2010 or so, into the mix, you get our television press of today.
It's not that the editorial-style journalism we see on prime time cable news today is intrinsically bad or something (look at my own programming choices!), it's that people don't tend to do what I do and watch more than one type of programming. People who watch MSNBC don't generally switch to Fox for an evening in the week or vice versa, that sort of thing. They feed themselves only a small range of perspectives when given the opportunity, and the result is that, frankly, most people today live in their own little information bubbles that are ideologically defined and rarely if ever come out and don't understand anyone on the outside. And that's one way you get needless political polarization. People needed to be forced to hear more than one perspective on events. It was better for the country.
I wouldn't say that anything is truly neutral today. There is mainline programming and counter-programming. Around the turn of the century, for several years after 9/11, jingoistic conservativism was the mainline represented by most of the major outlets (including not only Fox, but also CNN, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, etc.) and places like MSNBC that were more prone to like question the Patriot Act and the Iraq War represented counter-programming. Today, in the wake of the Trump era and all that represented (I'm being polite about that), the mainline programming is liberal and represented to varying degrees by everyone but Fox and the QAnon TV networks (Newsmax, OAN) and the various online analogies that influence them. That's how I see it anyway.