Well, I think it was "slightly" more recent that it become so ingrained with almost every journalist. Used to be that you still at least had a reasonably large margin at more local and some national levels where some journalists showed some integrity (80's-90's being the tail end of this), but that number shrank to almost nothing within the last 20 years.
It's been much longer than that, but the people running things were much smarter and better at hiding it than they are now.
Well, I think it was "slightly" more recent that it become so ingrained with almost every journalist. Used to be that you still at least had a reasonably large margin at more local and some national levels where some journalists showed some integrity (80's-90's being the tail end of this), but that number shrank to almost nothing within the last 20 years.