This whole post addresses advocacy journalism. That's the only type of journalism this post has in mind, except where otherwise noted explicitly.
The answer is that "journalism" became political advocacy as a result of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the 1960s. This was seized upon by "liberal" activists to influence public opinion and elections. With the ensuing exponential growth of the federal government, political decisions had an ever increasing impact on people's lives. Conversely, traditional news stories became less and less relevant.
Added to this trend is the increasing complexity of current science and technology which difficult for most people to understand, much less explain it to others. As a result, this area of news has largely become puff pieces needed to fill up a newspaper or nightly news broadcast.
Bread and circuses are what the people want, and that is what they are getting.
The answer is that "journalism" became political advocacy as a result of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the 1960s.
Advocacy journalism, which is a legitimate type of journalism -- there isn't just one form of journalism -- didn't result from the social movements of the 1960s. It's probably fitting to connect advocacy journalism's roots to civil rights efforts for that type of journalism began in the early 1800s with the black owned and operated
Freedom's Journal.
Advocacy journalism became a tool of non-blacks and non-abolitionists in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Muckrakers adopted it, thereby making it a post Civil War tool of populist white authors addressing issues -- alleged societal inequities, anti-establishment ones similar to those that today's populists decry, in the minds of the writers -- that catalysed mainstream whites and ushered the regulatory controls, labor rights, antitrust legislation, etc., that brought (somewhat) to heel the injustices wrought upon common people by the
Robber Barons and their political cronies. Surely you remember having read
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair or Ida Tarbell's expose,
The History of Standard Oil.
But for the advocacy journalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the average American, that is those from non-patrician and non-bourgeoisie/merchant class backgrounds, would still work for serfs wages from the sunrise of their childhood subsistence to the sunset of their sickly lives in unsafe factories only to slug their way home to squalid shanty town shacks.
This was seized upon by "liberal" activists to influence public opinion and elections.
I don't know what you mean by that sentence, but I want to address your strange use of quotes around the word "liberal."
There's no need to put liberal in quotes. The Muckrakers were liberal, which when the term was coined also meant Republican, for the most part. They, and much of the press were the only mouthpieces for the people. Populist movements have always depended on the sympathy of the press, and until (ostensibly) Trump and Trumpkins, they've always been liberal movements led or sustained by liberal writers such as the writers published in Abolitionist papers, to the social critics writing for
Collins and
McClure like
Steffens, to investigative Woodward and Bernstein, Sinclair, Tarbell, Nader, Hersh, and
Edward R. Murrow.
Few vocal people alive today remember Murrow, but his role as a Muckraker is worth briefly recounting for some might say that he singlehandedly is why we didn't lose the freedoms we enjoy today, the freedoms that allowed the Civil Rights and Women's Rights and Gay Rights movements to happen, even though he didn't himself cause any of them. Indeed, looking at the American political climate of the past lustrum or so, myriad clues augur for another Murrow's rise.
Murrow rose to international fame during the Second World War as the London Correspondent for CBS radio. His live rooftop reports brought the Blitz home in vivid detail to the American people and helped push popular sentiment towards joining the war. Once the war was over, he returned to the States and continued his brand of top quality journalism on radio and eventually television.
It was on television -- as part of his famous news program
See It Now -- that Murrow conducted his most searing investigation. Troubled by what he saw as an encroachment of civil rights by the actions of Senator
Joseph McCarthy and his campaigns to root out communist infiltration of American society Murrow decided to get to the truth.
Using the then new medium of television to its fullest power, Murrow used McCarthy’s own speeches against him, damning the man in his own words.
A style that still works today and has come to dominate cable news. Murrow was ambivalent about TV and famously lectured executives over their use of it, but few people have ever been so effective in combating injustices with TV as Murrow. He was a master journalist, a consummate professional, and did no less than make the country a better place. All by not being afraid to shine a light in the darkest corners of our world.
Watch the videos below. They should feel very "deja vu" in character.
Advocacy journalism has and remains the type of journalism that people in power least like. I suppose that's understandable as it's the form of reporting that connects all the dots, so to speak, and lays bare the excesses, and where applicable collusion, of government and big business. That's what it's always done. I doubt it'll stop.
With the ensuing exponential growth of the federal government, political decisions had an ever increasing impact on people's lives. Conversely, traditional news stories became less and less relevant.
What? Political decisions haven't ever not had a material impact on the citizenry's lives.
I don't know what you think you were trying to communicate by those statements, but I know you didn't convey it coherently. I know what the sentences mean, but what the heck do they have to do with the theme of your post, the paragraph in which they are found, or this thread?
??? -- Looking at the paragraph:
- "Journalism" became political advocacy as a result of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the 1960s.
- That, as noted above, is just factually wrong.
- Journalism didn't become advocacy. The discipline merely expanded to include investigative and analytical reporting, which some might call "whistle-blowing" journalism.
- This was seized upon by "liberal" activists to influence public opinion and elections.
- I have no idea to which noun from your prior sentence you refer by the relative pronoun "this." Even replacing "this" with each of the nouns from the prior sentence, it still doesn't make sense, especially because activists of all stripes aim to "influence public opinion and elections." Journalism doesn't alter that fact, and journalists have long reported on activists of all political alignments.
- With the ensuing exponential growth of the federal government, political decisions had an ever increasing impact on people's lives.
- Conversely, traditional news stories became less and less relevant.
- What? Conversely what and conversely to what? I can't tell what converse relationship you think you are highlighting between sentences three and four.
- The size of the government grew, and as it did, the quantity of news stories increased.
- I don't even see evidence that news stories have become less and less relevant. I don't at all observe that news outlets, especially major ones, report much in the way of irrelevant news.
One could say that national cable news networks' penchant to all friggin' day talk about a sensational event that has no real impact on anyone who'd not in/from that town -- things like police chases, murders, shootings, and other local criminal activity -- then, okay, they report irrelevant news. That sort of thing makes sense for and is relevant on local news channels and deserves a quick mention on national networks, but it certainly doesn't need to occupy the whole day, or worse, multiple days, on national and international TV news networks and radio stations.
Aside from the overhyped sensational human interest stories like those just mentioned, what I see, and what my OP gripes about, is their overemphasis on only a small handful of important stories to the exclusion of other important news and information.
- Just what do you consider a "traditional" news story?
- As noted earlier, advocacy journalism dates at least to the early 1800s. It's as traditional, at least in the U.S. as any other type of news story.
Added to this trend is the increasing complexity of current science and technology which [is] difficult for most people to understand, much less explain it to others. As a result, this area of news has largely become puff pieces needed to fill up a newspaper or nightly news broadcast.
I don't think I can agree with the emboldened assertion. A quick look at
Scientific American's website reveals myriad stories that quite accessible to the average individual. Ditto
Nautilus and the somewhat geekier
Quanta. What may be challenging about science and technology stories is that some people struggle to see readily the underlying significance of the information without being told expressly what it is. I'm not sure at all not understanding the impact of science/tech news is better than seeing some person enraged over real or imagined ills has decided to shoot-up a school in Connecticut and not knowing that it has absolutely no relevance in one's own life. In fact, I think it's worse because the science development is more likely to actually have relevance for one's life as much of science's learning sooner or later disseminates itself into everyone's life.
That said, political news, and even more so economic news, is far harder to understand, though on its surface it seems easier to process. Just like natural sciences and math, however, one must have training to "get it," and, quite frankly, most people haven't anything remotely resembling a strong academic background in economics, psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, and the other social sciences. Indeed, most people rarely are aware of American history beyond the high level pablum taught in fifth grade social studies; however, I suspect most of them think they know all there is to know and that's worth knowing about anything having to do with history and social science.
Bread and circuses are what the people want, and that is what they are getting.
That I'll just have to take your word for. I can observe how people behave and what they say. I can't speak to what people, in general, want. Hell, I'm not even convinced most people actually know what they want, even if upon giving them a list, they probably will pick things from it. I think most people will choose merely because the choice is there, and they can thus choose, not because prior to seeing "the list," they'd thought carefully and critically about what they want and had set upon obtaining it.
