Rose-tinted glasses seem to often filter out yellow journalism in discussions concerning journalistic decline. In the late 19th century yellow journalists were

Rose-tinted glasses seem to often filter out yellow journalism in discussions concerning journalistic decline. In the late 19th century yellow journalists were largely responsible for starting the Spanish-American War. And mainstream publications were hardly saints in the past either, for instance in the mid-20th century the NYTimes made themselves an uncritical mouthpiece for Stalin with denial of the Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter_Duranty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter... It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about the present state of journalism with such a sanitized inaccurate understanding of the history of journalism. From my perspective, modern journalism isn't doing great, but neither does it seem to be unusually bad. You might say the American press participated in starting the Iraq War, but in that case they were uncritically parroting what a US president was telling them, rather than pressuring a president who wanted peace into declaring war, as the yellow journalists did in the 1890s. Relative severity of these wars aside, it seems to me that journalism is presently better now than it was then.