The press would rather cover a chanting demonstrator than cover the Speaker of the House.
For anyone in the news business, just the name 'Cronkite' conjures up images of a bygone era when journalists covered, and could at times impact, the most important stories of the day, rather than the most 'compelling' or salacious.
The sports pages record man’s accomplishments. The front pages record his failures.
The more boring a newspaper is, the more it is respected. The most respected newspaper in the United States is The New York Times, which has thousands of reporters constantly producing enormous front-page stories about bauxite...The [New York] Post would write about bauxite only if famous celebrites were arrested for snorting it in an exclusive Manhattan nightclub.
Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.
I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.
Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"
The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.
