I still doubt anything has changed. I remember the hatchet jobs "60 Minutes" was infamous for 40 years ago.
"If it bleeds it leads" is a very old saying. So is "history is written by the victors". And it's normal for news to run hysterical stories, because those sell.
But there's a more general problem. There are some fields I know a great deal about. Whenever I see a news story about one of those fields, they're almost always pathetically wrong. This is because the journalists are reporting on something they have no understanding of. I've also seen them report on events I have personal knowledge of, again, they get it all wrong, usually because they're in a hurry to get the story "in the can" and simply don't care to fact check.
My father was a historian, and in our discussions we'd often wonder how much of conventionally accepted historical truth is utterly wrong.
"If it bleeds it leads" is a very old saying. So is "history is written by the victors". And it's normal for news to run hysterical stories, because those sell.
But there's a more general problem. There are some fields I know a great deal about. Whenever I see a news story about one of those fields, they're almost always pathetically wrong. This is because the journalists are reporting on something they have no understanding of. I've also seen them report on events I have personal knowledge of, again, they get it all wrong, usually because they're in a hurry to get the story "in the can" and simply don't care to fact check.
My father was a historian, and in our discussions we'd often wonder how much of conventionally accepted historical truth is utterly wrong.