There was a time between the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century when the American news media became so corrupted and so viciously biased that character assassination, fake news, lies, scandalous rumors, bias, racism, and invasions of privacy were the new norm.
In time the few honest news organizations and reporters decided such “Yellow” journalism tactics had to end in order to protect the integrity of the entire news industry that claimed Constitutional protection under the Bill of Rights.
For those of you ignorant of history and blinded by political correctness, the term “Yellow” at the time was used to denote gutless, unethical, immoral and outright lies promulgated by certain publishers and reporters.
The general public was sick of the nonsense and the vast majority no longer believed the news media or press. To the public, the media had lost all signs of objectivity, were beholden to their advertisers, and intent on destroying opposing views or competition.
The newspaper business started in the 1800’s with papers being affiliated with political parties. In time the editorial was introduced to allow papers to post articles showing the other party opinion on issues, a technique adopted more to expand the business than to result in fair coverage. Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune in 1841, is credited with inventing the idea of segregating news reports from opinion writing, by giving opinion its own page.
No national media organizations existed at the time but eventually a group that today is known as the Society of Professional Journalists, founded in 1909, first adopted a Code of Ethics in 1926 covering the print media only.
Although the Code was not enforceable except by voluntary means and had no basis under the law, it was still embraced by all major members of the news media, including radio and television networks and affiliates after the 1973 rewrite.
Three major technological advances would eventually revolutionize the news media industry with the commercialization of the radio in the 1920’s, telephone in the 1930’s, (just 32% of American households had a phone by 1937), and television in the 1950’s (in 1950 just 10% of homes had black and white television, by 1964 a staggering 94% of all homes had television).
Reporting, as a result of the Code of Ethics, took a sharp turn to become popular with the general public. This tremendous growth in public exposure by television heralded in the Golden Age of reporting, the 1960’s and ‘70’s.
Suddenly television news anchors were among the most trusted people in America, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley who drew millions of faithful followers for their nightly news broadcasts.
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| Announcing death of JFK |
Cronkite’s integrity was so beyond reproach he reached 57 million viewers for the Apollo landing on the Moon in 1969. At the time there were 125 million viewers in a population of 202 million Americans meaning nearly 50% of all viewers were tuned to the CBS News with Cronkite. In terms of average network followers, the 1969 average was about 31 million, with Cronkite pulling 11 million versus 9 million in each of the other two networks.
The population has tripled since the 1969 Moon landing but what happened to network news watchers? As noted, 125 million people watched the Moon landing on all three networks, with Cronkite pulling 57 million. Today, with three times as many people, we still only have about 119.6 million network viewers.
From the 31 million average network news viewers in 1969, it rose to 48 million viewers in 1985, then began a rapid descent. By 1998 there were 30.4 million network news watchers, but today the number has dropped to about 21 million total watchers.
As for the popularity of anchors, Walter Cronkite was consistently voted the most trusted anchor on television and in 1972, he was named the most trusted man in America in all walks of life. Today the most trusted network news anchors are only known by 21% of the TV audience.
Watch for Part 2 – The Golden Age of News – Destroyers of the Truth.
