Is Fox News the Smartest Journalism Ever?
Tabloid Television Is Great at Manipulating America’s Long History of Elitism and Class Conflict
Lamenting the decline of journalism is a familiar trope of our media culture. Since a great wave of tabloid TV shows emerged in the late-1980s and cable news gained influence in the 2000s, there has been no shortage of complaints. As anchor Ted Koppel said in 2011, newscasts “no longer give you what you need to know but what you want to know—and that can be mindless trash.”
The critique that journalism has been corrupted by commercial entertainment is remarkably old. It goes at least as far back as the 1830s …
