[jacob019]

Is it just me or have all mainstream news agencies suffered a significant loss in quality in recent years? It all seems lazy, opinionated, more like social media and less like old school journalism, less trustworthy... and now they're cutting book reviews?! Maybe I'm just getting older.

[lupusreal]

Journalism was always bad, it just seemed better in the past because people had less to compare it to, less ability to check things out themselves, etc. As for "Old School Journalism", was that the sort that helped George Bush start the Iraq War? Or the sort that started the Spanish-American War? If there was ever a golden age of journalists when people spat straight facts without interjecting their bias, I genuinely have no clue when it was.

You can find an archive of thousands of PBS News Hour episodes online, I've watched dozens of episodes from the 80s and 90s. This show has a tone and air of respectability, a thoughtful show for high brow people who like to consider the facts. But that's really just the surface aesthetic. Besides modern news shows being flagrantly tacky, the meat of what they do is the same; repeat some basic 'facts' about the story, many of which will be proven wrong in later years, then have some people selected through mysterious processes come on to talk about how the viewer should feel. In retrospect very little of it was ever accurate and stories which seemed important then aren't in retrospect.

[vlz]

Well, not to be too obvious, but people do not pay for news anymore, they expect news to be free on Google or social media. Hence firing of journalists, loss of quality everywhere. Less money, less quality.

[phendrenad2]

You're right. It's the collapse of web advertising, I think. News websites can't make money from ads adjacent to articles, so now the article is the ad.