[hsitz]

I get that newspapers and the journalistic profession used to be different, and in many ways better, than they are now. Still, doesn't it strike you as interesting that brilliant, thoughtful people living at at the same time as those "better" newspapers made criticisms similar to those being made today? Thinking too poorly of the present and too well of the past is a common error. Or, on a related not, "There's nothing new under the sun."

[voxic11]

He said they were pretty bad in the early days, not that they were better.

[hsitz]

Hmm, I certainly thought he was implying that things used to be better. The fact that "journalistic credibility was hard to come by" was surely a good thing, no? It means readers are applying more stringent standards to what they read. As opposed to now, when (supposed) journalistic credibility is easier to come by, but worth much less. . . .

[kissickas]

Quite the contrary, I believe, and I'm sure your original parent comment was making the opposite point of what you think.

As far as I remember from grade school, newspapers in the US started doing legitimate work around the time of "muckrakers," early investigative journalists. It seems we've returned to the days of yellow journalism, when sensationalist articles were written just to push up circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker

[hsitz]

Interesting. Thanks. And I had always thought of 'muckraker' as a derogatory term, though it seems it must have started out, at least, as an approbatory term for the positive development of muckraking out of yellow journalism(?).