Do We Ever Get Any Real News?

When I was a kid, which was before most of my readers were born, if I wanted the news, I read The New York Times. It was the ‘paper of record,’ and what it said was what I believed was true.

How did the NYT get its daily news content? From three sources: its own reporting staff and two wire services — Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI). These wire services employed reporters all over the world who got paid when they sent the wire service a story which the AP or the UPI could then send to all the newspapers which paid them a subscription fee.

There were only a handful of newspapers in America which had enough money to keep a certain number of reporters on their staff. These papers, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, created their daily content with a mixture of reportage from their own staffs, plus whatever they decided to print that day from AP and UPI. The media, first radio and then TV, put together their news programs the same way.

In smaller cities, the local newspapers only kept a couple of reporters on staff whose job was to make sure that nothing which happened around their town was missed. So, the local paper carried stories about the town’s upcoming high school football games or the Ladies’ Auxiliary raffle, but what basically kept the local media…