| It's interesting to look at what made newspapers reasonably immune to such pressures in the years after Holt's book / lecture. I'm a bit hazy on details, but generally: - Growth especially of large-city dailies and some consolidation of markets effectively gave newspapers some market leverage over most advertisers. There were still some somewhat-untouchable entities, but for the most part, a reasonably-strong editorial independence was achieved. - It was also possible to go muckraking in another district --- outlying suburbs or cities elsewhere in a state or country, which didn't contribute advertising to that particular institution. - Increased reliance on classified advertising and legal notices. Each of these were huge contributors to newspapers' revenues, whilst at the same time giving relatively little risk of an advertising boycott. The dawn of Internet classifieds (Craigslist gets a lot of blame, but it was pretty much inevitable, someone would enter that niche) was absolutely devastating in that regard. There's another bit of media history that I think pairs excellently with the Holt book. It's a 1970s interview with I.F. ("Izzy") Stone, on the PBS programme "Day at Night". That's on YouTube, which is ... somewhat less accessible to me with its current shenanigans, but might be available here: <https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> <https://youtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> In particular, Stone calls out the distinction between major city dailies, which had strong editorial independence over local businesses and politicians in the 1970s, versus small-town and rural newspapers, which were far less independent. Keep in mind that this interview occurred in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters literally brought down the President of the United States --- it was a high-water mark for journalistic independence and power. I return to both these references often. |