You know, I get the sentiment of these sorts of posts. But it doesn't really seem to matter at which point in history you think is the golden age of journalism,

You know, I get the sentiment of these sorts of posts. But it doesn't really seem to matter at which point in history you think is the golden age of journalism, they were still selling the news and that often meant sensationalist headlines on the front page fairly often to grab attention and pull readers in. This is not a new thing on any level. You can quibble that news stories were "less" sensationalist in the past, but that's very debatable. It's not as if anyone in this thread from 2018 can rattle off the ten headlines from 1918 or pretty much any year they didn't live through. So I would take any appraisal's of today's news compared to the past without some hard data to back it up with a few grains of salt. I'm of the mind the more things change, the more they stay the same as far as this subject goes.