But they've been feeding off of the news services for a very long time. Even when a byline was by some local reporter, they were usually just regurgitating what the news wires were saying, but in their own words.

All that high-minded, high-school media class fluffery about "journalistic ethics" aside (the ideal is rarely the reality of any situation), the news outlets have always been subject to opinionistic "shading", whether from the editors themselves, or the pressure from advertisers (such as when two weeks of Bloom County was not shown in many newspapers because of a storyline that involved the victims of cosmetics testing.) It's just that the modern world, and the internet, has been tearing off all the clown masks off of all the bullshit humans sell to themselves.

It's just that, at one time, the media was skewed towards the status quo, or at least seemed to. Now the "counter-culture" of the mid-twentieth century has become "the establishment" without wanting to admit it.

But they've been feeding off of the news services for a very long time. Even when a byline was by some local reporter, they were usually just regurgitating what the news wires were saying, but in their own words.

All that high-minded, high-school media class fluffery about "journalistic ethics" aside (the ideal is rarely the reality of any situation), the news outlets have always been subject to opinionistic "shading", whether from the editors themselves, or the pressure from advertisers (such as when two weeks of Bloom County was not shown in many newspapers because of a storyline that involved the victims of cosmetics testing.) It's just that the modern world, and the internet, has been tearing off all the clown masks off of all the bullshit humans sell to themselves.