On your closing question: I don't think there was ever a "golden age" of coverage. Every age has had its strengths and weaknesses. The post-WW II Cronkite / etc "golden age" had enormous virtues — of which the main one was a more-or-less enforced nationwide audience, since for technology reasons there were only three broadcast …
On your closing question: I don't think there was ever a "golden age" of coverage. Every age has had its strengths and weaknesses. The post-WW II Cronkite / etc "golden age" had enormous virtues — of which the main one was a more-or-less enforced nationwide audience, since for technology reasons there were only three broadcast networks. And the reporters mainly came from a news-rather-than-"hot takes" tradition.
But it had huge limits too. The "news" was condensed into 30 minutes each evening. As many people have noted, it was a top-down approach to what mattered. Civil rights protests, the Vietnam war, etc "mattered" when the news editors decided they mattered.
We have more range now, and very different problems. The economic-model collapse of local journalism is probably the worst phenomenon now. More on that anon.
For what it's worth, my experience has long been that *newsroom culture* matters more than ownership in most journalistic decisions. Of course editorial pages are a different matter. But consider the WSJ: Its edit page is the print version of Fox News, and was even before Fox existed. But its "news" operation has been less prone to the kind of narratives we're talking about — even though it's under Murdoch's ownership.
(I once edited a news magazine, and I can tell you that the owner played a significant role in what that magazine did and covered. But again that was a non-mainstream case.)
Thank you.
On your closing question: I don't think there was ever a "golden age" of coverage. Every age has had its strengths and weaknesses. The post-WW II Cronkite / etc "golden age" had enormous virtues — of which the main one was a more-or-less enforced nationwide audience, since for technology reasons there were only three broadcast networks. And the reporters mainly came from a news-rather-than-"hot takes" tradition.
But it had huge limits too. The "news" was condensed into 30 minutes each evening. As many people have noted, it was a top-down approach to what mattered. Civil rights protests, the Vietnam war, etc "mattered" when the news editors decided they mattered.
We have more range now, and very different problems. The economic-model collapse of local journalism is probably the worst phenomenon now. More on that anon.
For what it's worth, my experience has long been that *newsroom culture* matters more than ownership in most journalistic decisions. Of course editorial pages are a different matter. But consider the WSJ: Its edit page is the print version of Fox News, and was even before Fox existed. But its "news" operation has been less prone to the kind of narratives we're talking about — even though it's under Murdoch's ownership.
(I once edited a news magazine, and I can tell you that the owner played a significant role in what that magazine did and covered. But again that was a non-mainstream case.)