My family received morning and evening papers. They watched Walter Cronkite for 15 minutes and/or Huntley and Brinkley, first for 15 minutes then for 30 before it morphed into NBC Nightly News.
Some magazines delivered the news. I loved reading old Newsweeks and Time Magazines in the Boston Public Library to research what was happening long, long ago. Going through them for WWII news, I was fascinated to see each aspect of the war as it unfolded when I knew how it ended.
TV news is now 24/7. Social media reports news and faux news 24/7.
Advertising, which paid for the editors, journalists, paper and printing presses is vanishing causing the death of many papers. Other papers melded into one corporation. Alternative facts abound.
Especially now under the Trump canopy, news is often slanted.
The U.S. is in danger of self destructing and part of the reason among many is people do not know the truth. Some of it might be deliberate with people having too much to do and too little time to do it in.
A more serious problem is reader education or lack there of. It isn't just the lack of a college degree but the dumbing down of the school system. Book banning, watered down text books, companies like Prager University Foundation, which is not a university but produces materials for schools with a singular point of view.
Issues like putting the Ten Commandments in schools override things like school lunches.
The U.S. is raising another generation of ignorant people.
Among those that have a college, there is an unknown hierarchy of news sources that attract the better educated. The study was done by Pew Research.
The Pew Research Center is a non-partisan American think tank which does not take political stances in the many studies and surveys it undertakes.
As the country sinks deeper and deeper into trouble, the need for top quality, in-depth reporting has never been greater. Hopefully the better educated will save the country.
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