Hate to say it, but journalistic integrity is very much an endangered species in this country. Once Clinton deregulated the media, it began the consolidation of the number of entities you could get your news from. And once your local news entity got snapped up by a large corporate conglomerate, cost-cutting and economies of scale started to come into play.
The reality is that news bureaus are EXPENSIVE to run properly. From a large corporate entity’s perspective, it makes sense to consolidate them nationally and underfund them. If you want to make money in media, emphasize the things that draw people’s attention like sex, celebrities, crime and disasters. Real news simply doesn’t make sense when your main driver is profit and keeping the stockholders happy.
Not to mention we lost the independence of our Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The Republican majority in Congress let it go underfunded which forced it to seek revenue from corporate sponsors. So now it’s not much different from a major commercial network.
The so-called Fourth Estate of the media is no more in this country. Only a mandated and independent public news service coupled with re-regulation of the general media market can bring things back to the way they were.
