Much of the fourth estate has eroded in the last 15 years as revenues declined for local newspapers. As the fastest shrinking industry for many of those years,

Much of the fourth estate has eroded in the last 15 years as revenues declined for local newspapers. As the fastest shrinking industry for many of those years, they have lost considerable economic leverage to be able to do what we, for the last 70 years, consider journalism. Add to that massive consolidation of the industry that was made possible by changes in legislation in the last 30 years, and you're left with a shadow of what previously existed. News staff have been in sharp decline along with these drops in revenue as well so there's just fewer people to write the stories that might be important, but less popular. And that's not even getting into television journalism. I don't have much first hand about it, but my suspicion there is that the proliferation of cable news led to a similar fall in revenue for the journalism that network news used to be able to support. Worse, is I think the proliferation of cable news started to change news consumption, making it more and more a form of entertainment, and less and less a form of information and contemplation. Then there's the internet... I once believed that the internet would set the world free, by making it easier and easier to gain knowledge. And while, I personally find it easier to gain specific knowledge than ever (even while the average quality drops precipitously), there's just so much information (for lack of a better word) being pushed to us daily that things like long term issues related to whistle blower extradition, just has too much to compete with, even if it may have very serious repercussions. So yeah. Mainstream journalism isn't what it used to be. There's some hope, in that it's easier for an individual to publish content, so more random important topics have a chance to surface. But the noise, there's so much of it that these voices are just drowned out. And, I am really grateful for HN, because the quality of content that bubbles up is quite high (especially in the comments), but I don't ever see the golden age of news journalism coming back.