I have long been a news junkie- I suppose it all started back when my younger brother and I delivered the Atlanta Journal to a few hundred apartments every day when we were 11 or 12 years old. By the time my route was over, I'd read the paper cover-to-cover, and was ready to discuss the day's news during our family dinner.
Durning my high school years, I volunteered with Jimmy Carters' Presidential election campaign- spending hours addressing envelopes and cold calling people; asking them for their vote. It was around this time that my parents discontinued the afternoon paper and began receiving the morning paper - and the first time I noticed a real difference in the reporting style. The evening paper (the Journal), which I had grown up with, touted individualism, hard work and self-reliance. The morning paper (the Constitution) was published by the same family, but it seemed to push a different narrative: it was not only ok, but it was better to rely on the government for your basic needs than to work for it yourself.
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By the time I was able to vote in my first election, Jimmy Carter was running for re-election...and there was no way in hell I would spend a minute of my time licking envelopes for his campaign. I already owned my own small business and had earned enough money to purchase a German cabriolet - and I picked it up in Germany! I was also smart enough to put a Canadian flag decal on the bumper (I loved Reagan, but but he wasn't quite so popular with the Europeans). And, I was still consuming a lot of news. Back then, we still had three main networks (ABC, CBS & NBC). But, I was enamored with Ted Turner and his new 24/7 news station: CNN. I had met him a few times down at the Braves stadium; no doubt he was a brilliant businessman. But, as smart as he was, he was also just a little left of center field. And, he wanted his news to reflect his opinions.
That said, CNN still played it very straight during the initial years. HIs wacko environmental stuff came along ten years later, and the far left talking heads didn't arrive until Trump's run for the White House.
Nonetheless, I consider the dawn of CNN and the 24/7 news cycle, the beginning of the death of journalism in America. Why, you might ask? Well, prior to CNN, pretty much everyone catered to the masses. Sure, the media has always been weighted down by folks with a liberal bent, but for the most part, newspapers, magazines, radio news and television news all played it fairly straight.
The 24/7 news channels changed the playing field, though. With the arrival of Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and the globalization of news in general, the giant players like the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, New Yorker, etc., were able to spin their liberal agenda to vast numbers of like-minded Democrat-educated consumers across America. And, the more their audience lapped up their drivel, the more they spewed. The cycle spun faster and faster, more and more dollars were sucked into the whirlpool of advertising, and the executives of the media giants and advertising agencies cheered.
Meanwhile, the Journalism schools looked on in disbelief. The administrators, with a passion for left-wing politics, were also overjoyed. Their dreams of filling the airwaves with propaganda were finally coming true.
And, Journalism in America was finally dying...
