Finally, there has been the consolidation of the newspaper industry into a few large chains -- Gannett being the largest. Their principal editorial goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, especially advertisers. The result is a homogenization of editorial policies so that they all do little more than echo the conventional wisdom.
Of course, there are still a few trendsetters, such as The Wall Street Journal on the right and The New York Times on the left. But this is a poor substitute for the dynamic local newspaper markets of years past.
Everything bad about the newspaper market goes double for television news. At least newspapers allow dissenting voices and publish corrections. Television news operations not only never allow dissenting opinions to be aired, but never admit error, either. They say it is because of time constraints, but that's just an excuse. They could, for example, use their websites far more creatively than any of them now do.
This "we-know-the truth-and-we-are-never-wrong" attitude is in the process of destroying CBS News, once the very best in the business. When confronted by compelling evidence against its documents regarding George W. Bush's National Guard service, it simply refused to acknowledge their legitimacy. The Nixon White House never circled the wagons as tightly.
In the old days, this might have worked. But today there is cable news, C-SPAN, talk radio and the Internet to raise questions and disseminate raw material to millions of people who are no longer bound by the quasi-monopoly of three television networks and one-newspaper towns. They can now get news that otherwise would be suppressed or ignored, check original sources for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
It has long been a mystery to me why the major televisions networks (and CNN) decided to broadcast exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with the same identical liberal spin. One would have thought that for purely competitive reasons, one would have appealed to conservatives just to have an edge and make an extra buck. But instead, they all decided to be exactly the same, varying only in the degree of their contempt for Republicans and anything remotely conservative.
To his credit, Rupert Murdoch saw this opening and created Fox News, which was rewarded by beating every other network during the Republican convention. The imminent collapse of CBS News as a serious news operation will only boost Fox and the alternative media still more.