News

The appearance of Trump on the political scene in 2015 brought some major challenges to journalism. The first thing they noticed was that Trump was a money maker. No matter what they published as long as it was about Trump they made lots of money. They were not concerned about the country because they figured that there was no way that Trump could be taken seriously by the voters. They had concerns about what this would do to the field of journalism but the TV stations and Newspaper could see the profits and so it was all ahead Trump. In time they discovered that they could get bigger audiences by concentrating on Trump's personality as opposed to his policies. This mean the news could be more subjective not having to worry about policy facts. Prior to the 90's going back to the early days of TV with people like Walter Cronkite the news was mostly center left without the hard core positions. The first change happened in 1988 when Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio by becoming a conservative voice. This was followed by Fox News in 1996 so by the time Trump came along the ground work was set for a move to the left or right. The game is now set with Fox and talk radio on one side and the rest on the other side. The result offering information to your audience that they want and so objective journalism has been replace by subjective journalism. Right now the battle is raging between covering personality or policy. With policy you have to stick with facts but with personality you can discuss opinions about a persons character including the words and phrases they use. From the standpoint of the journalist it is much easier just to speculate about a persons personality than to research their policy position and this is especially true if you can get a bigger audience taking the easy way out.