Re: The truth is usually complex
Compared to the newspapers of a hundred years ago todays all news is an utter disgrace.
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.
There is no mythical golden era. The press has always had good bits and bad bits - and now is no different. Journalism has pretty much always been under financial pressure too. I'd say it's always been true that people are more interested in human interest and sensation than they are in boring old politics. So if politics can be reported to have human interest and sensation, then it will be more popular. But I think that only lasts a bit - and then people get sick of it and decide they're all corrupt unprincipled bastards. Because now all they're reading about is scandal, because they're still not reading the boring stuff about policy - they're just reading politics reported as star gossip. Politics as showbusiness for ugly people...
I think the internet has done quite a bit of damage to journalism. Firstly in that it's bollocksed up the income stream even more than normal. Hence doing less expensive journalism and more cheap churnalism (lightly re-writing PR and putting it out as your own stories). But also in the complete metrics editors can see of what sells. Before the editor could tell the money-men that although a picture of Dianna would put 50-100k on the Sunday paper's circulation - there still needed to be real news in it too, or sales would plummet like the Express. But now the money-men can tell exactly which stories get the most clicks and can delude themselves that they don't need an editor.
An "alt-left" type like The Canary actually pays its journalists by the number of clicks they get on their articles. So if you write a boring political story with a headline that says what's in it - you'll go hungry that night. So it's full of the worst clickbait type bollocks - or at least was the last time I looked at it.