http://fair.org/slider/the-rise-of-establishment-reporting/
The Rise of Establishment Reporting
How a crisis in journalism led to the cult of balance
By John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney
A crisis in journalism lasted from the 1890s until the 1920s. Party-driven journalism had disintegrated, the increasingly lucrative and powerful newspaper magnates ruled their independent empires and exercised considerable political power, and the pursuit of profit sometimes led to an incredible, even appalling, journalism. Mounting public anger and dissatisfaction with the journalism of this era produced what became the first great existential crisis for journalism.
The problem at its core was that a relatively small number of very powerful newspaper owners dominated their communities and states, and a handful of them had national empires. Market economics was pushing toward more concentration and ever less competition. As even the publisher of the Scripps-owned Detroit News argued, in private, in 1913, the corrosive influence of commercial ownership and the pursuit of profit were such that the rational democratic solution would be to have municipal ownership of newspapers.
In view of the explicitly political nature of newspapers in American history, this was not as absurd a notion as it may appear today. Scripps, always the most working-class-oriented of the major chains, even launched an ad-less daily newspaper in the 1910s, because it saw how commercialism undermined the integrity of the news.
By 1912, three of the four candidates for president—Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Eugene Debs, all but President William Howard Taft—made the irresponsibility and corruption of the daily press a theme of their campaigns. The world of newspapers had turned upside down in three decades.
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