The papers on our doorstep
I grew up mostly in Massachusetts, where the New York Times landed on our doorstep every morning along with the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. Many considered the Boston Globe the more neutral news source, and the competing Boston Herald Republican-leaning.
The Times stayed our paper for news beyond the local when we moved to Palo Alto for a brief stay in California. The Wall Street Journal was no problem: as a business paper not tied to New York, it was available everywhere, even at the airports. We got the Times by mail, and briefly there was even a Western Edition that was delivered daily.
The gold standard
The Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were simply considered the gold standard: higher quality reporting, writing, editorials, book reviews and travel. Even the Times crossword was considered more sophisticated, and people I knew did it religiously every day. Respected figures wrote articles and op-eds for them.
And the public trusted the news media as a whole. Gallup’s measure of trust in newspapers, TV and radio peaked at 72% in 1976, right after the Vietnam and Watergate reporting.
They leaned left. They kept it out of the copy.
Nobody should pretend those newsrooms were politically balanced. In 1980, political scientists Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed about 240 journalists at the Times, the Post, the Journal, the networks and the newsweeklies. Among those who voted for a major-party candidate, 81% backed McGovern in 1972, the year Nixon carried about 60% of the country. Fifty-four percent called themselves left of center; 17% said right.
The study was funded by conservative foundations and critics questioned the sample. But nobody seriously argued that 1970s newsrooms were full of Goldwater voters.
Here’s the point. Those same reporters filed copy that most Americans trusted. Their politics stayed out because the profession expected it to. The professional norm of objectivity was a discipline, and editors enforced it.
Uncle Walter and the evening news
The networks were thinner than the Times. Twenty-two minutes a night can’t match a front section. But for most Americans, Walter Cronkite on CBS, Huntley and Brinkley on NBC, and later Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner on ABC were the news, and they played it straight.
They had two reasons the papers didn’t. The first was the law. From 1949 until the FCC killed it in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to cover controversial issues and air contrasting views across their programming. It didn’t dictate how the evening news was written, and it never applied to cable, but station licenses were on the line, and that made everyone careful.
The second was money, or rather the absence of pressure to maximize it. The evening newscasts themselves made money from their commercials, but the news divisions as a whole, with their costly foreign bureaus and documentaries, usually lost money, and the networks accepted that. Bob Wright, who took over NBC after GE bought it in 1986, recalled that NBC was losing money on news when he arrived and that this “was thought of as an acceptable situation.” News bought prestige and satisfied the FCC’s public-service expectations. Nobody had to chase ratings with outrage.
Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America” after a 1972 Quayle poll rated him above every politician tested.
The evidence that something changed
The vocabulary shifted. David Rozado and colleagues ran 27 million news and opinion articles from 47 popular outlets, 1970 to 2019, through word counts. Terms like “racism,” “sexism” and “transphobia” rose sharply after 2010, in outlets left, right and center. By Rozado’s later count, racism-related terms grew 712% at the Times from 2010 to 2020, 468% at the Journal and 361% at the Post.
The headlines got angrier. A second Rozado study scored 23 million headlines from 2000 to 2019. Headlines signaling anger rose 104% and fear 150%, while neutral headlines fell 30%.
When I was growing up, sensational headlines had their own rack. Generoso Pope Jr. built the National Enquirer on gory, lurid headlines, and by the late 1960s it sat by the supermarket checkout, where you grabbed it on the way to the register. I still remember one about a man who drilled a hole in his own head, with a black-and-white picture of a guy holding a brace and bit, one of those old-fashioned U-shaped hand drills you cranked.
Nobody confused it with the Times.
Today the checkout-aisle style headline has become the standard for the news. The difference is that the Enquirer never pretended to be the Times. Today’s outlets use the Enquirer’s techniques and keep the Times’ prestige.
I also remember a 60 Minutes segment on the Enquirer’s yearly psychic predictions. The people behind them said they would have a big dinner and all get really drunk to think up the crazier ones. Nobody in a newsroom today needs a bottle, but the idea is the same: come up with the most outrageous thing you can, because outrageous is what gets attention or satisfies the readers’ opinions. And like the Enquirer’s predictions, the ones that turn out wrong are never revisited.
The norm was challenged out loud. In June 2020, the Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned after staff revolted over an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. Weeks later, Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer winner formerly of the Post, argued in the Times that objectivity should give way to “moral clarity.” That idea spread through newsrooms.
The public stopped trusting. Gallup’s measure of trust in the news media, 72% in 1976, hit 28% in September 2025, the first reading below 30%.
The business changed too
In the mid-1980s, Capital Cities bought ABC, General Electric bought NBC and Larry Tisch took control of CBS. News became a profit center. Foreign bureaus closed, staffs were cut, and the old public-service bargain ended just as the Fairness Doctrine went away.
As cable news, the internet and much else came along, the old business model stopped working. In 2020, Warren Buffett, who loved newspapers, sold every paper Berkshire Hathaway owned. He said the business had gone from “monopoly to franchise to competitive to toast.”
Newspapers had long made most of their money from advertising and classified ads, and the internet took both.
With the advertising gone, the news itself had to become a revenue center. And once papers had to fight the whole internet for every click, outrage paid better than restraint. Layers of editors were expensive, and the careful, toned-down copy they produced couldn’t compete with the internet’s clickbait.
Twitter tweets are the internet’s version of the bumper sticker, and too much news now reads like one.
The news became just another source of sensationalism for clicks: the modern version of the old National Enquirer. And a soapbox for reporters’ opinions. On the internet everyone has an opinion, and reporters piled into that trend. The tempered, educated roundtable shows of the old days became a modern version of Jerry Springer and Howard Stern. The arguments got shallow too; a lot of today’s news commentary reads more like a Reddit thread than journalism. “Fake news” became one way to describe what happened.
It isn’t just the newspapers. I see the same thing on the nightly news, in the AP wire copy that feeds hundreds of local papers, and worst of all in the UN’s own reports, which the press passes along as if “UN says” were a neutral ruling. I covered that in What the UN Is — and What It Is Not.
Papers became segmented markets, each lined up with its own demographic. The ones that survived found other ways to pay the bills. As I argued in Is The New York Times Still a Newspaper?, much of the Times’ growth comes from puzzles, recipes and sports, not the news. Its hit game is Wordle, the Twitter of crossword puzzles.
What we lost
What we lost was the discipline that kept reporters’ politics out of the copy or the news show. Back then, a reporter could vote for McGovern and still write a story a Nixon voter would trust. That was the gold standard, and it had nothing to do with whether reporters had opinions. It was about whether they were expected to keep them to themselves.
The reporters tried to be journalists.
Sources
Project Westward Ho: The First New York Times West Coast Edition, Journalism History
The Wall Street Journal’s Pacific Edition, MediaVillage
Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low, Gallup, 2016 (1976 peak)
Remembering Walter Cronkite, Smithsonian
The Transformation of Network News, Nieman Reports, and Fast changing channels, Christian Science Monitor, 1987
Lichter–Rothman “media elite” survey findings, The Media Elite
Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse, Rozado et al., 2021, and PolitiFact on the 2010–2020 counts
Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news headlines, PLOS ONE, 2022, and Reason’s summary
National Enquirer, Britannica
James Bennet resigns after Cotton op-ed, CJR, and Lowery’s “moral clarity” argument
Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S., Gallup, 2025
Warren Buffett gives up on newspaper empire, Fox Business, and Axios, January 2020