by Kranix-76 » Wed Jun 13, 2007 7:31 pm
In the United States, it's the legacy of Hearst and Pulitzer, in a sense: the creation of news media as part of an industry, whose purpose is not to inform but to compete with other news media "outlets" for readership (and, now, viewership). The birth of sensationalism didn't happen within our lifetimes, either; it came at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, to which historians still cast a raised eyebrow as to whether the Hearst papers had a hand in creating "the first shot." Even with the urban muckraking of the early twentieth century (such as what would go on to produce The Jungle, among other things), sensation was the big draw for most newspaper readers.
Granted, it was never so widespread in ages past, in part because of the expansion beyond print. Television and, most recently, the advent of the Internet have allowed for a more rapid exchange of information...at the expense of depth and breadth of coverage. Suddenly, it isn't news but newsbytes, and instead of being the only program on at 6:00 pm, the Evening News has to compete with reruns of Everybody Is Fairly Indifferent Towards Raymond. So, enter the old competition models provided by Hearst and Pulitzer.
Yet, up to the Vietnam era, journalism was slowly increasing in its civic commitment (y'know, whenever it wasn't busy preseving Cold War ideology and bashing hippie culture). Walter Chronkite still is recognized as one of the few journalists whose name is synonymous with "integrity," and news media reached an unprecedented point of "checks-and-balances" with the break of the Watergate scandal...isn't it funny how an unsuccessful war and the Yuppie Era (our beloved 1980s) seem to turn things right around?
Of course, most news media today still bash hippies and speak highly of the (Cold) War on Terror. Some things never change, I suppose...
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