With my work in running historical security council simulations for model United Nations, I've spent a fair amount of time in the back issues of the NYT and it is amazing how much more detailed everything was thing. The journalism may have largely been repeating what public officials were saying and AP/Reuters/UPI wire stories, but there was so much more. Summarized transcripts of speeches given on the floor of the Security Council, detailed reporting of what foreign ministers were saying and not just soundbites, etc. I ran a simulation in 1990 to cover the Gulf War, and the NYT had vastly superior breadth of coverage - and arguably deeper- coverage than now.
I've heard it said that news is just what fills the space between advertisements. And why pay an actual journalist when you can just grab stuff off the wire, or from syndicated columnists.
Carl Sagan, in Episode 3 of the original
Cosmos, filmed part of that episode at a news stand. He went on to explain why astrology is pseudoscience and not science. He did an excellent job of debunking it, and it was like a lightbulb went off in my teenage mind. I've been able to separate science from pseudoscience ever since. Astrology is fantasy, but as Sagan said, every newspaper has a daily astrology column, with wildly differing horoscopes depending on which syndicated astrologist's column is used. He said that most newspapers don't even have a weekly science column (or so I recall; I'd have to rewatch that part).
People buy newspapers partly for that kind of mindless crap (even the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, now has an online astrology column - and did even as they hired a succession of abominably awful "journalists" to write science articles in which they proved that they had no clue what they were talking about; fortunately the person they have now
is someone who knows what she's talking about). And on the way to look up their horoscope, they might notice the odd news story, read the headline, and assume they understand the rest of it. Then they read the ads. All those lovely ads that the newspaper gets $$$$$ for.
I never see the ads on the news site I read, and any news site that demands I disable ABP is not a news site I read. I know they're a business, but I refuse to be inundated with that. I choose the companies I want advertising emails from. That doesn't include newspapers, and ever since most of the papers in this region were bought out by a right-wing chain that dictates the slant of the major stories and many of the columns, what's the point of reading that?
The only reason I'd pick up the local paper right now is because of the municipal and federal elections. I have no idea who's running locally other than the incumbent (because of course that POS is guaranteed to be elected; Reformacons always are here), but I still want to know whose name I'm going to be writing on my ballot. And the school board candidates are going to get an email, asking them to state their views on the draft curriculum. Any attempts to deflect or be vague or tell me anything other than it's horrible and needs to be scrapped will result in that person not receiving my vote.
As for in-depth coverage of the news... If I want in-depth on TV, for major stories, I'd watch CBC's
The Fifth Estate. CBC still has some very good investigative journalists, but they're of the previous generation who got their start in the pre-internet/pre-social media era. I don't like to think what's going to happen after they retire.
) and use it as an "enemy combatant" so as to fire at it with real ammo. The result was, of course, that the whole thing exploded, and since he didn't bother with any calculation he was hit by the debris - losing a limb.
