I posted a shorter version of this as a comment over on the Crunchy Con blog yesterday. The topic was the demise of the gatekeepers of news—a few big newspapers and the three major broadcast television networks (before Fox came along). As it happens, I had been planning to post something here on the same topic, and this will serve the purpose:

My wife & I went for many years with no cable TV, thus no CNN etc., and very little TV news at all, which gave us an odd perspective on the news—we never had much idea of the TV pseudo-events (so-and-so's gaffe, etc.) that drove so many things, didn't recognize parodies of politicos or catch-phrases, had little idea of the TV presence of major figures. Then we got cable and for a year or two switched between CNN and Fox News at breakfast. It was fun for a while, but then one day we said to each other "I'm really sick of these people"—their ginned-up urgency, their saturation coverage of the trivial and superficial coverage of the serious, their endless teasing of some big story "coming up soon," their self-importance, their prejudices, and of course the damned commercials. Now we read the morning paper at breakfast. It's very pleasant. It's mostly local stuff. For non-local news we browse multiple sources on the net.

Newspapers may very well be dying. Ours no longer makes any pretense that it believes you are turning first to it for news of the world. Almost every day the major headline involves something local. And they do a good job; you feel that the people writing the stories have an attachment to the community and understand it. Television news may be dying, too, victim of the Internet as newspapers were, in part, its victim. I don't think I'll miss it much, but I would miss the newspaper. I almost hate to say this, because it sounds like the effete note one sometimes hears in a certain kind of conservatism, nostalgic for something that was a disruptive innovation in its day—but reading the paper seems like a civilized thing to do. It is certainly easier on the nerves than television news.

Younger people (younger than, I would guess, 40 or so—I'm pushing 60) may not realize the stranglehold that Walter Cronkite and a handful of others had on the news for so long. It was a very tendentious, to say the least, view of the world, and it literally defined reality for millions of people, or rather that part of reality outside their local environment. Good riddance to them.