What caused journalism to decrease so rapidly in quality through the second half of the twentieth century...

What caused journalism to decrease so rapidly in quality through the second half of the twentieth century? Why is there less interest in news these days?

People used to get two newspapers daily.

Are you stupid? People were getting tons of newspapers until... you guessed it, the proliferation of the internet. That also caused a good deal of degradation in qualify (according to some).

Shitty journalism has been around forever. You ever heard of yellow journalism? It basically caused the spanish-american war and that was the 19th century. Obviously it still persists today but to pick an arbitrary date such as "the second half of the twentieth century" is stupid.

The decline in journalism as a discipline. For example, CNN doesn't even do investigative journalism anymore; rather, you can pay them to send a "reporter" who will report back whatever you tell them to.

An oligopoly also removes any trust in the media what so ever. Some NINE corporations dominate television. While bias is understandable, the clear collusion and the deleterious effects it has removes any trust people have. How do I know I'm being told the truth, or that I'm being presented with all opinions? I can't and I'm not.

And, of course, the internet, which did two things:

Firstly, it removes the need for secondary sources. In the past, it was next to impossible to present primary sources: Now, I can see them easily. Journalists play a three way role of commenter, extrapolater, and interpreter. Their role as someone who brings you news has been lessened.

Secondly, it distributes the role across a multitude of people. In the past, you got six opinions from nine media conglomerates, nothing else. Any issue was presented within a very narrow narrative and any stepping outside of this was shunned or simply ignored. Now, however, that's no longer the case and you can find people commenting on things from millions of viewpoints. A libertarian, a communist, a Fascist, a Nazi, a neocon, a scientist, and a hippy can all comment on the exact same event and bring their own ideas to the table.

>second half of the twentieth century
>implying

>Decrease of Quality?
Someone here hasn't heard of Yellow Journalism.

>A libertarian, a communist, a Fascist, a Nazi, a neocon, a scientist, and a hippy can all comment on the exact same event and bring their own ideas to the table.
Fancy words for "Confusion, screeching, and fighting in news comments section."

Journalism has always been shit profession for the worst human beings imaginable.

Just read some of the crap from the WW1 and WW2 era. The amount of jingoism, fear-mongering, and war romanticism was truly legendary.

There's no difference between early 20th century headlines like 'Germans are Evil Subhuman Raping Poor Belgium' and 2017 headlines like 'Trump is a Manchurian Candidate Puppet of Evil Overlord Putin Who Wants to Start Nuclear War'.

Just more proof that the internet is truly a blessing rather than a curse. For the first time, we get the first truly independent, non-corporate individuals spreading objective and unbiased information on a widespread and instantaneous digital platform.

Anyone who thinks that you need a $900,000 journalism degree to have the right to spread information is a cunt who should be publicly hung.

Information boom transformed "current news" from small regulated and controllable trickle into endless torrent of text, disaster photos, and screaming headlines.

Information stream has exploded in intensity, breadth and availability. Capacity of humans to consume and compile that information -- has not.

Ability to switch the channel or close the tab gave people the choice to ignore and pick and choose information they want.

With limited capacity to take information the window until regular human loses interest can be as low as several seconds to read headline and lower still.

Producers of information are forced to compete for that dwindling window of man's limited attention span and have no choice but to resort to what works -- appealing to lowest common denominator.

>For the first time, we get the first truly independent, non-corporate individuals spreading objective and unbiased information on a widespread and instantaneous digital platform.
No one reads AP or C-Span, they just source them for their own articles with their own spin.

>For the first time, we get the first truly independent, non-corporate individuals spreading objective and unbiased information on a widespread and instantaneous digital platform.
>there are people who believe this