Originally Posted by kane

When I was in my early 20's I wrote for a music magazine. It was a lot of fun and a crazy, cool job. At that time in the two cities I was splitting time between (Portland and Seattle) there were probably 30 major radio stations and like another 30 smaller stations. Most of them were independently owned. It was a huge controversy when one company wanted to own two stations in the same market.

Now almost all of these stations are own by the same 2 or 3 companies. The same can be said for newspapers and magazines. With that comes a corporate mentality and many of them want you to slant the work you do in a particular way. This hurts journalism badly. Another problem is that TV news is now a for profit enterprise. It wasn't too long ago that TV stations produced news understanding that they were going to lose money or maybe break even. They did it as a public service and didn't care about ratings. As the ratings game increased the news stations started competing for viewers. They worried less about breaking interesting stories and more about putting stuff on the air that will draw viewers. Hell, if you look at the major 24 hour news networks half of their programming is not pundits. They have stopped doing the news and now produce a show. They are really not much different than a sitcom or a TV drama.

It is sad. What saddens me more is that most people don't care.