For over four and a half decades as a news reporter and investigator, I have watched the media in this country decline as reporters and editors nationwide are laid off. I quote my very own November 2006 story in Truthout.org:
"If some doomsday industry analysts are to be believed, newspapers are laid out and stacked neatly inside their own future death warehouses, not only in the United States, but worldwide.
Hosts of editors, reporters and readers are angry just listening to and repeatedly reading what they consider "excuses" to increase profits while eroding probing enterprise journalism. Those committed to public service news and investigative reporting believe grave industry profits to be manipulative, shallow or misleading. In fact, the very rationale for saving newspapers - cost cutting, layoffs and buyouts - is thought to have created circulation and profit drop-offs, and to foster the very predictions of a dark, deadly fiscal whirlpool. The bigger the staff and cost cuts, the more advertisers and readers are scared away, indeed creating loss of disgusted readers and lesser profits.
As newspaper size shrinks, experienced reporters and editors are replaced by relative greenhorns. Then, the comparative evidence in daily published reporting shows a wide variety of in-depth stories and features morphing into larger sensational headlines, bigger photos, news graphics and repetitious bad news dominated by politics, crime and war."
These news media shrinking details continue today, raising the question: How much longer will it be before the news one reads becomes simply propaganda driven by whom: the big rich corporate operators intent upon promoting their businesses inside a willing media.
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