News

News, also commonly referred to as the news media or news industry, focuses on delivering current events, information, and important events of the day to the general public. The industry includes news agencies; print media, such as newspapers and news magazines; broadcast news, such as radio and television; and the internet, such as online newspapers, news videos, and blogs. The news, or press corp, is sometimes called the fourth branch of government, or the fourth estate, which refers to its political importance. At the same time, it functions as a business that bases its ability to serve the public on the ability to attract attention and dollars.

Popular anchorman Walter Cronkite at his news desk.

The people working in news include journalists, broadcasters, researchers, news analysts, writers, editors, photographers, graphic designers, translators, film or video editors, camera operators, broadcast and sound engineering technicians, announcers, producers, directors, and performers. Also included are the roles behind the scenes, such as public relations specialists, representatives, marketing managers, entertainment lawyers, and distribution workers.

News is often considered a sub-industry of the larger media industry. Media is largely associated with a wide range of activities, such as advertising, entertainment, and the news industry. Inside media, the news industry includes operations such as radio broadcasts, websites, newspapers, magazines, television broadcasts, and podcasts. Each unique form of media can be used for various purposes, such as non-news activities like entertainment podcasts, classifieds, and advertising, in addition to the transmission of news.

The term "fourth estate" has been used throughout history since the French Revolution to describe journalists and the news outlets they work for. The term refers to the watchdog role of the press, which is important for a functioning democracy, in part to ask difficult questions of those in power to keep power in check—be that political power, social power, or economic power—and to help inform the public on events both foreign and domestic to help make an informed voting public.

Journalists interview a political figure; part of their watchdog function is to hold those in power to public account.

Further, the term fourth estate is used to acknowledge the influence and status of journalists and news outlets among the greatest powers of a nation, wielding public influence and importance. And it refers to the responsibility of the press to be the people's watchdog. This role has been threatened as some forms of news, such as television news, are focused on entertainment and advertising dollars arguably more than acting as a watchdog for the public. And local newspapers and radio broadcasts are threatened by larger distribution national newspapers and satellite radio, which have no ties to local concerns, reducing the public's awareness of their local area. Although some of this has been replaced by local online journalists enabled through the frictionless distribution of the internet, often these individuals do not have the time or resources for important investigative journalism.

The three estates preceding the fourth estate were traditionally thought of as the king, the clergy, and the commoners; a more contemporary version of the fourth estate has been placed alongside the three branches of government as exemplified in the United States: legislative, executive, and judicial.

The term is largely considered to be out of date in the twenty-first century and is often used with irony, as public trust in journalists and news coverage generally dropped from 2004, when the majority of Americans reported some trust in the mass media. By 2016, trust in the media dropped to only a third having any trust in the so-called fourth estate, and only 41 percent in 2019, suggesting the public perception of the news has failed at its public watchdog function, and it tends to be seen as having a lack of independence from political and corporate power and influence. News organizations are also increasingly seen as too politically close to each other, and people tend to be skeptical of the ability of news organizations to serve objective coverage. This lack of trust was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated government measures across various countries.

In response to the relative collapse of the ideal of the fourth estate, the term and concept of the fifth estate has arisen, which refers to parts of society not covered as part of the traditional four estates and is more commonly thought of as alternative media. This can include journalists, citizen journalists, bloggers, and social media users who use the internet to generate or share news and information.

The fifth estate is often considered a threat to the traditional four estates, as it tends to be free from the roles and regulations to which the other four estates are beholden. For example, social media users are not required to adhere to journalistic standards as professional journalists, allowing them to share information without having to worry about accuracy or balance. But it is also seen as a force for good, as it can provide a check on the power of the traditional fourth estate and give ordinary people a voice when they otherwise may have not had one. Others consider the fifth estate to pose an existential threat to both the traditional four estates and a threat to society. WikiLeaks is one of the most famous examples of an exercise of the fifth estate.

Example of various newspapers from around the world.

A newspaper is often considered the oldest form of the news and one of the earliest forms of mass communication. A newspaper is traditionally a printed publication issued daily or weekly and consisting of folded unstapled sheets that contain news, feature articles, advertisements, weather forecasts, critical reviews, gossip columns, and correspondence. The content of newspapers depends on the circulation of the paper but is often categorized as either general or special interest. These can be general across a nation or the globe or general across a small community, and special interest can include any niche topic.

Newspapers are printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. Some papers were circulated to paid subscribers, and other free papers relied on advertising revenue (paid circulation papers included advertising revenue as well). And both paid and free papers included classified sections which, prior to the internet, were a major revenue generator for newspapers. The internet has proven to be the biggest challenge to the newspaper industry, reducing paid circulation and news revenue and causing newspapers to shift from paper to online distribution. Some believe the internet will lead to the downfall of the newspaper's role in society; however, other new media technologies, such as radio and television, failed to supplant print media.

Example of an Italian "gazette".

One of the earliest publications that could be considered a precursor to the daily newspaper appeared in Rome around 69 BCE. This was a primitive news sheet called Act Diurna, or "acts of the day," which described the activities of the Roman Senate. When Marco Polo returned to Europe after traveling to the "Orient," he brought back the idea of the court gazette, which is thought to be the oldest continuing newspaper in history as it did not disappear in China until the early twentieth century. The gazette has Italian origins, as in Venice in the sixteenth century, accounts of frequent wars were printed in news bulletins, a copy of which could be bought with a gazetta: a small coin. The name would stick as a description of newspapers. One of the key enablers of the newspaper industry came with Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, which helped make the daily circulation of newspapers possible while reducing the cost to make them accessible. This allowed the newspaper to increase its scope and reach.

Example of early German newspaper.

Another early newspaper emerged in the Germanic states of the sixteenth century, when the German people had been accustomed to broadsheets (single news sheets printed on a single side), pamphlets, and books before news pamphlets began to appear in shops that dealt with subjects such as battles, disasters, miracles, and coronations. By the 1700s, more or less regular newspapers began to appear across Europe. Often these were considered to be instigated by traveling Germans of the time. Many of these early German papers would be without the name of the city in which they were printed to avoid government prosecution, but the papers despite these concerns were a success, which helped with their spread across Europe.

Header from one of the first printed paper's in England.

England saw the first printed paper published in 1621 under the title Corante, or News from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France, and the Low Countreys. By 1641, a newspaper was printed in almost every country in Europe as publication spread. These early newspapers followed, generally, one of two major formats. One was the Dutch-style "corantos"—a densely packed two- to four-page paper; the other was a German-style pamphlet, which was a more expansive eight- to twenty-four-page paper. Many of the papers would start in the Dutch style to later expand to the German style.

Many of these early publications were regulated by the government and would not report on local news or events. However, when civil war broke out in England in 1641, citizens turned to the local papers for coverage of the events. November 1641 saw a weekly paper titled The Heads of Severall Proceedings in This Present Parliament, which would begin to focus on domestic news, and this would fuel a discussion around the freedom of the press that would be later articulated by John Milton in 1644. This would have an effect on printing regulations, and England would see freedom of the press established following the civil war and that has lasted since. During this period, strict printing laws of the time were relaxed if not outright repealed, and the freedom of the press was established alongside the growth of the representative government following 1688.

Illustration depicting the King of England securing freedom of the press rights in law.

Page from the longest-surviving daily paper.

Papers would take advantage of this freedom and publish more frequently, with biweekly publications, which would allow the papers to include more space to run advertisements, which allowed the papers to play a larger role in the market, as businesses turned to them to advertise their wares. As newspapers grew in popularity and profitability, they would become daily publications. In 1650, a German publisher began printing the world's oldest surviving daily paper, Einkommende Zeitung, and an English publisher would follow in 1702 with London's Daily Courant. These daily papers would develop new formats with big headlines and the embellishment of illustrations and would turn the paper into a fixture of people's daily lives.

The page of Benjamin Harris' Publick Occurrences

In the United States, the birthplace of the press would be Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England in the 1630s. Often, as many people traveled to the colony to escape the tyranny of class, government, and church, many of the early publications dealt regularly with these topics. One of the earliest papers in the American colony came in September 1690 when Benjamin Harris printed Publick Occurences, both FORREIGN and DOMESTICK. Harris had previously been a newspaper editor in England before he fled fearing persecution for publication of an article about a Catholic plot against England. The articles published in the paper followed in this controversial and inflammatory vein, and the publication would fold after a single issue.

The New England Courant, which would carry James Franklin's critical reporting.

Fourteen years after this incident, The Boston News-Letter was launched. Fifteen years after that, The Boston Gazette began publication, which would be followed by the American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia. These papers worked to avoid following in Harris's footsteps, and the early papers would avoid political discussions to avoid offending Colonial authorities. Politics would return to the newspapers in the American colony in 1721 when James Franklin published a criticism of smallpox inoculations in the New England Courant. The paper would again criticize the colonial government a year later for failing to protect colonial citizens from pirates. This would land James Franklin in jail.

James Franklin would again offend authorities for mocking religion, which would lead to a court dictate that he would be forbidden to print or publish The New England Courant or any other pamphlet or paper unless otherwise supervised. Following this order, James Franklin turned the paper over to his younger brother, Benjamin Franklin, who would also publish The Pennsylvania Gazette and conceive of subscription libraries.

In 1733, John Peter Zenger would found The New York Weekly Journal. Zenger's paper soon began to criticize the newly appointed colonial governor, William Cosby, who replaced members of the New York Supreme Court when he found they could not be controlled. In late 1734, Zenger would be arrested by Cosby, who claimed Zenger's paper published scandalous, virulent, false, and seditious reflections. Eight months later, Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton would begin a defense of Zenger at trial, in which he compelled the jury to consider whether or not what was printed was fact. Ignoring the wishes of the judge, who personally disapproved of Zenger and his action, the jury would return a not-guilty verdict after a short deliberation. This trial, and more importantly, verdict, would result in two movements towards freedom of the press in the American colony: it demonstrated papers could potentially print honest criticism of the government without fear of retribution, and the British became afraid an American jury would never convict an American journalist.

Illustration from the trial of Peter Zenger.

This would lead to greater calls for emancipation from England, and the newspaper became a conduit for political discussion, highlighting increasing conflicts between the British and the colonists. These conflicts would further force papers to pick a side to support, with the majority of newspapers taking the side of the colonists, and only a minority of newspapers were pro-British. Throughout the Revolutionary War, the newspapers would continue to publish anti-British viewpoints and information, birthing a partisan press in some opinions. After the revolution, the two political parties—the Federalists and the Republicans—would emerge, and the newspapers would choose a preferred party, maintaining the partisan tradition.

Following the Revolutionary War, the United States would adopt the First Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights, which states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise of or abridging of the freedom of speech or of the press. This formally guaranteed freedom of press. However, in 1798, in reaction to the harsh partisan press, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which declared that writing, printing, uttering, or publishing any false, scandalous, or malicious writings against the government of the United States were punishable by a fine and imprisonment. Thomas Jefferson, when elected president in 1800, would allow the Sedition Act to lapse to prove that freedom of the press was necessary in a democratic society.

The Sun, the progenitor of the penny press.

In the early 1800s, newspaper remained relatively expensive to print. Daily papers were becoming more popular, giving merchants up-to-date vital trading information. They were priced at about 6 cents a copy, which was above what artisans and other working-class citizens could afford, limiting readership to a relative elite group. This would change in 1833 when Benjamin Day created The Sun. This paper was printed on small, letter-sized pages, which sold for a penny. Day was able to achieve this through the newly developed steam-driven, two-cylinder press to print the paper. This was an innovation on the old printing press, which could print approximately 125 pages per hour, and was capable of printing approximately 18,000 copies per hour.

Example of a newstand selling copies of the "penny press" papers.

The paper also followed a new philosophy set by Day in trying to reach everyone at a price anyone could afford, supported partially by advertisers as well. To further this goal, The Sun sought out stories with an appeal to the more mainstream, working-class readership, and as such included more human-interest stories and police reports. Further, the paper left ample room for advertisers. This would prove a successful model, with The Sun becoming the first of what would be known as a "penny press." Prior to the penny press, New York City's Courier and Enquirer had sold 4,500 copies per day, which were eclipsed by The Sun's 1835 sale of 15,000 copies per day.

Illustration of the new printing technology which made the penny press possible.

Another early successful penny press was the New York Morning Herald, published by James Gordon Bennett and introduced in 1835. Bennett further made a mark on the newspaper industry by offering non-partisan political reporting while introducing more aggressive methods for gathering news, hiring both interviewers and foreign correspondents. His was the first paper to send a reporter to a crime scene to witness the investigation. And in the 1860s, Bennett hired sixty-three war reporters to cover the US Civil War. The Herald initially emphasized sensational news but would become one of the most respected newspapers in the United States for its accurate reporting.

Another historical and technological breakthrough for newspapers was the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse. Newspapers would turn to the emerging telegraph companies to receive up-to-date news briefs globally. The expense of the service led to the formation of the Associated Press (AP) in 1846 as a cooperative arrangement of five New York papers, including the New York Sun, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer, the New York Herald, and the Express. The success led to the development of wire services between major cities, meaning editors were able to collect news as it broke rather than gather already published news. Wire service also allowed for greater collaboration between papers and increased breadth of subjects any given paper was able to report on, further increasing the appeal of newspapers to all sectors of society.

Joseph Pulitzer, one of the founders of yellow journalism.

A new journalistic style emerged in the late 1800s in the pages of the New York World, published by Joseph Pulitzer. This style relied on an intensified use of sensationalism, while publishing stories focused on crime, violence, emotion, and sex. Pulitzer would later make major strides in the newspaper industry, including adding sections focused on women and pioneering the use of advertisements as news. Pulitzer's papers initially relied on violence and sex in its headlines to sell more copies, and this style would serve as a forerunner for the later tabloids, where the practice of editors relying on shocking headlines to sell papers continued. Investigative journalism was predominant in the yellow press, but editors would take liberties with how stories were told, often printing an editor's interpretation of a story without maintaining objectivity.

William Randolph Hearst, who competed with Pulitzer over paper sales.

While Pulitzer was establishing the New York World, his main rival was William Randolph Hearst, who had at one point been an admirer of Pulitzer and would become a principal competitor of Pulitzer with his takeover of the New York Journal. Hearst—who partially inspired the 1941 film Citizen Kane—would go to war with Pulitzer with their respective papers and in an attempt to outsell one another. The papers would slash their prices down to a penny, steal editors from each other, and fill their content with outrageous, sensationalist headlines. This Included reports during the Spanish-American War, which included huge front-page headlines and bloody accounts of the war, which often were inaccurate.

Example of the Yellow Kid comic used by Hearst to sell papers.

Part of the war between Pulitzer and Hearst saw their papers introduce new elements in their competition for readership. In 1896, Hearst would introduce R. F. Outcault's Yellow Kid to attract readers that may otherwise not buy an English language paper with readers eventually buying papers for the successful yellow nightshirt-wearing character. This cartoon was part of the creation of the term yellow journalism to describe the kind of papers in which it appeared.

Elizabeth Cochrane, who, writing under Nelly Bly, would engage in stunt journalism for Pulitzer.

Pulitzer would respond with a gimmick of his own, introducing stunt journalism. The publisher hired journalist Elizabeth Cochrane, who would write under the name Nellie Bly and report on aspects of life that had previously been ignored by the newspaper industry. Her first article would focus on the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. To do the reporting, Bly feigned insanity to be committed to the asylum, and she recounted her experience in her first article. She became known as the first stunt journalist and gained notoriety and fame for this. These stunts were considered lowbrow entertainment, and the journalists who undertook this style of reporting were often criticized more than traditional journalists. Early stunt reporting was almost completely done by women reporters and gave them an opportunity to move their reporting from the women's section of Pulitzer's paper to the front page.

Despite their colorful history and place as one of the first examples of mass media, newspapers have been in decline since the emergence of the internet. They have worked to retain their share of advertising, competing for the attention of the consumer who can receive the same news story from a variety of sources. Prior to the internet, newspapers had already survived amid the proliferation of radios and cable and satellite-broadcast television channels. However, as newspapers aged, they found more readers consulting their pages for a special section rather than reading them from front to back as had been done previously.

Other mass media sources have continued to influence the style and substance of newspapers as audiences are seen to seek entertainment in tandem with more straightforward news. Newspapers have diversified as more readers in developed countries have leisure time, so they have included more stories and sections on leisure activities. Similarly, they have reported more on travel as the travel industry has increased in its popularity. This has further allowed the newspaper to attract a wider and more diverse range of advertisers.

As the internet has grown, and newspapers have begun to close, local newspapers and their communities tend to be the hardest hit, as those areas rarely receive a print or digital replacement for those papers, creating what have been called news "deserts," where individuals and communities are somewhat unaware of what is occurring in their community and how wider policies may be affecting their community. This has been called a crisis for democracy, as it creates blindspots where individuals are unsure of what is going on at various levels of local and municipal politics, reducing the "watchdog" service the press is considered to serve and increasing the ability for corruption to grow in specific communities.

Example of children from the 1920s listening to the radio.

Broadcast news is commonly defined as any news source that is broadcast, either by radio signal or digital transmission, with popular examples being television news broadcasts or radio broadcasts. The term "broadcast" was first used to refer to transmitted radio programs in the nineteenth century, which would be further popularized in the 1920s with an increase in access to radios. Radio transmissions created new terminology to differentiate them from older forms of communications, particularly from printed newspapers. Since this time, broadcast has begun to refer to a wider variety of transmission types, including the following:

• Radio programs, such as news, music, advertising, and talk radio
• TV programs, including news, advertising, and scripted or unscripted TV shows
• Online programs, such as edited video or audio, live streams, and advertisements

As the consumption of news has increasingly turned online, digital broadcasts have begun to include multiple forms of media to allow individuals to choose their preferred mode of consumption. Often a news article will include audio and/or video versions to give an individual options to read, listen to, or watch a story. Many types of broadcasts are journalistic or news-based in nature, but that does not mean all broadcasts are news; many broadcasts are intended to entertain, advertise, or discuss specific interests not constitutive of journalism or news.

Circa 1920s radio broadcasting station.

The development of the first broadcast technology, the radio, is itself interesting and controversial, but there tends to be a consensus that radio broadcasting began in the 1920s. Prior to the 1920s, radio was typically used to contact ships out at sea. During World War I, the importance of the technology became more apparent as it was used as a primary form of communication in the military. For news, the radio would first broadcast in the 1920s with one of the first news broadcasts coming from KDKA in Pittsburgh. At the same time, England's British Broadcasting Company (BBC) began to surface. In 1920, the Westinghouse Company applied for a commercial radio license that, upon receipt, allowed for the creation of KDKA, which would become the first station licensed by the government and worked as an advertisement mechanism for Westinghouse to sell more radios to the public.

Early BBC radio transmission.

In 1922, in Britain, the BBC began its radio broadcasts in London, which soon spread across the United Kingdom but failed to properly challenge the newspapers until 1926, at which time there was a newspaper strike, and radio and the BBC became the leading source of information for the public. The US and the UK also saw people tune into radio for entertainment purposes, which made gathering in front of the radio a common occurrence for families at the time.

In the United States, the rising popularity of radio broadcasting would lead to the development of some of the early networks. In 1926, RCA started the National Broadcasting Network (NBC). Two years later, the United Independent Broadcasters became the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and began competing. Otherwise, at this time, most of the broadcast radio stations across the United States were owned by department stores and newspapers, and these stations were used to promote the owners' businesses. As these stations grew, and non-profit groups operated stations for their members, interference became an issue.

In 1927, the government stepped in with the Radio Act of 1927, establishing the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) to oversee the regulation of those airwaves. The FRC reallocated station bandwidths to correct interference problems and reserved forty high-powered channels for the larger networks. Despite complaints and concerns over the allocation, the Communications Act of 1934 would pass, and radio would remain a largely commercial enterprise. The Communications Act of 1934 would also establish the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which would usher government regulation into radio, such as the 1938 decision to limit stations to 50,000 watts of broadcasting power. As a result of this, RCA would be forced to sell off parts of its NBC network, which would become the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1943.

This, in part, began the so-called Golden Age of Radio, often considered to be between 1930 and the mid-1950s, in which the purchase of a receiver gave owners access to radio, which offered free broadcasting, providing users with an inexpensive source of entertainment. Radio also presented an accessible form of media existing on its own schedule, which (unlike newspapers or books) caused people to tune in at a given time to listen to a favorite program, becoming a routine for many.

Example of a radio play with various actors.

During this period, radio made a few innovations, which would be further expanded upon with television broadcasting. The first was the development of a daytime market, which aired serial dramas and programs focused on domestic work and were filled with commercials for domestic needs. For example, the serial dramas were often sponsored by soap companies, which would give the shows their name—"soap operas." The second major development was the establishment of "prime time" radio, when the family would gather in the evening to listen to the radio together, and stations would host popular variety shows; later in the evening, so-called prestige dramas included actors from Hollywood recreating popular films on the radio or acting out adaptations of literature.

The Golden Age of Radio also saw radio broadcast news begin to challenge newspapers and surpass them in popularity, partially due to the radio's ability to emotionally draw audiences into the events that evoked stronger responses and therefore greater interest than print news could. Part of this was an increase in recording technology, giving reporters a chance to record events in the field and broadcast them back over the airwaves. One of the early examples of this was Herb Morrison's recording of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937. The entire event, including the sound of the exploding blimp, was recorded and broadcast, bringing the listener to an emotional connection with the disaster.

Video of the live radio transmission of the Hindenburg disaster.

Radio news would continue to increase in its importance and in its ability to bring the world to the listener during World War II, when radio was used to bring the sober stories of the war. One example of this came in 1940, when Edward R. Murrow, an American journalist working in England, broadcast firsthand accounts of the German bombing of London, giving Americans a sense of what the English were experiencing at the outset of the war. Radio outlets were also the first to broadcast the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Example of early RCA television transmission from 1939.

When the first breakthroughs in research produced the breakthroughs that would become television, it captured the imagination with the promise of changing the world. One of those researchers was David Sarnoff, who worked for RCA and had previously recognized the potential of "wireless" broadcasting—a way of transmitting from a single source to a geographically dispersed audience. He became interested in progress and expanding the "miracle of radio" and pushing that forward. His vision for television saw action-adventure programs, mysteries, soap operas, situation comedies, and variety shows would coexist with high-toned drama, ballet, opera, classical music performance, and news and public affairs programs, all supported by advertising to avoid the system of government control as seen in Europe and the UK.

As early as 1939, NBC, CBS, and DuMont had established experimental television stations in New York City and began limited broadcasting to the first few thousand households, which had purchased the first sets for consumer use. Following Pearl Harbor, CBS's station began a news program that used maps and charts to explain the war's progress to viewers. This programming would end abruptly in 1942 when public and private resources were shifted to the military, which forced the networks to shut down their television units, delaying television's more mainstream launch for several years.

In 1944, the stations owned by NBC, CBS, and DuMont would resume broadcasting, with NBC and CBS launching aggressive campaigns to sign up affiliates in other cities. ABC and DuMont had financial and legal problems, which caused them to fall behind NBC and CBS in the race for affiliates. But even for NBC and CBS, building television networks was costly, which required the newer technology of the coaxial cable designed to link television stations into a network. The project to lay the cables in the United States would be done by AT&T with government involvement. By the end of the 1940s, most of the East Coast had been linked, with connections reaching Chicago and much of the Midwest. But even at the beginning of the 1950s, no more than 30 percent of the United States was able to reach network programming.

The 1946 RCA 630TS television model.

Another challenge to the early rollout of television was the price of the first television sets. The basic RCA models, which had been envisioned as the "Model T" of television sets, cost $385 at the time, and the top models cost around $2,000, while the average annual salary at the time was around $3,000. These costs represented a lot of money even when consumers could buy the sets through department store installment plans. But the industry expanded—1946 saw approximately 20,000 television sets in the US, and this number grew to 350,000 in 1948 and grew again to 15.3 million by 1952. The television stations grew from six stations in four cities in 1946 to 108 stations in sixty-five cities by 1952, before the FCC froze the issuing of station licenses from 1948 to 1952.

The FCC freeze would benefit NBC and CBS while it would hamper ABC and DuMont. Ultimately, DuMont would cease operations in 1955. For all networks, among the first kinds of broadcasts that aired in the waning years of the wars were news programs. The news programs were considered to build the prestige of the nascent television services, creating an image that was useful in attracting audiences and stimulating commercial sales. CBS led the way with a fifteen-minute evening news program in 1944, broadcast on Thursdays and Fridays, the two nights of the week the network was on air. NBC would launch its own Sunday evening newscast in 1945 as a lead-in to ninety minutes of programming. Both resembled the newsreels regularly shown in movie theaters, with a series of filmed stories cobbled together with voice-over narration by off-screen announcers.

These were well-established conventions when the networks, in response to the sales of television sets, expanded their evening schedules to seven days a week with regular weeknight newscasts. These newscasts relied on film provided by newsreel outfits and featured rotating casts of announcers—often announcers who wanted to be on the radio but would settle for television. There were early struggles with the newscasts, with some off and on failure and success, until 1952, when more were becoming established and ABC launched an ambitious primetime news program called All Star News, which combined filmed news reports with man-on-the-street interviews.

Swayze at his desk for the Camel News Caravan show.

In 1949, NBC reworked its evening newscast into the Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze as an on-camera newsreader. The program mixed newsreel footage from a variety of foreign and domestic agencies and freelancers with Swayze's narration and on-screen presence, with him sitting at a desk with a prominently displayed Camel logo and presented with overlays of the headlines of the day. Swayze proved popular with viewers and would host the broadcast for seven years. The broadcast itself assumed its viewers had read the day's newspaper and assumed its role was to accompany the paper with pictures and film footage but not to go too deep into the news or break the news. During this period, many of the stations still worked under the shadow of the networks' radio divisions, which were considered serious while television was still considered shallow.

Example of an early teleprompter in use.

News agencies experimented to find what would make for a better newscast and keep the audience interested. This included using still photos and graphic arts to produce charts, maps, and captions to tell stories. Various devices were developed for visual cues for stories, including the teleprompter, which replaced cue cards. The film shifted from expensive 37mm film to 16mm, which was less expensive and easier to produce. A double-projector system was introduced to mix narration and film. With this system began one of the archetypal television news segments—a "stand upper," which introduces a story that is cut with film of other scenes while a reporter's words serve as a voice-over narration. Then a "wrap-up" is inserted, with the reporter appearing on camera again, often at the scene of the story.

One of the earliest opportunities for television to display its news gathering and presenting potential came in 1948, when the networks would visit Philadelphia for the political conventions. The parties had selected Philadelphia with an eye on television. Radio had previously covered these conventions but never offered "gavel-to-gavel" coverage but offered bulletins, wrap-ups, and acceptance speeches. But television did not have the lucrative programming radio did and was able to broadcast an entire day devoted to the conventions. These conventions acted as television displays, and viewers would gather in the homes of friends and neighbors with televisions and also crowd stores, restaurants, and bars where a television offered them a view of the conventions.

Image from the 1948 conventions held in Philadelphia, one of the important moments in television news.

These conventions were a technical challenge, and the lack of expertise of the relatively new medium saw the four networks collaborating to solve the problems. They would use the same pictures, while each network brought its own newscasters to provide narration and commentary on the events. Cameras of the time were heavy and bulky, and therefore there were no roving floor reporters, and any interviews were conducted in makeshift studios set up in rooms adjacent to the main convention rooms. Partially due to this, there was little coverage of anything other than what occurred at the podium. It proved a success, and though there were only 300,000 television sets in the entire US, industry research suggested as many as 10 million Americans saw the convention coverage.

Television cameras from the 1952 convention.

This exercise was repeated four years later, when the Democratic and Republication conventions occurred in Chicago, and the networks were prepared from their experience, bringing more nimble and sophisticated equipment to cover the event with the capability to reach a nationwide audience. Further, manufacturers sponsored the coverage, which was much wider and more complete than in 1948. During this convention, CBS employed Walter Cronkite as its main announcer, who narrated, explained, and commented on the events, with his face appearing in a small picture-in-picture window while the main screen followed the convention floor. During this convention, Cronkite would become the first news announcer referred to as an "anchorman."

This event brought approximately 60 million viewers of the conventions, with an estimated audience of 55 million at the peak of the conventions. Television critics even praised the networks for their contribution to civic enlightenment. Print journalism remained the most complete source of information, but television allowed users to see events in real time, and the reporters the stations collected offered their experience in their commentary and analysis of the events as they unfolded.

Broadcast news increased in popularity during the twentieth century; for some, it became the dominant source of information, partially replacing the function of newspapers by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although the majority of news consumption was from television broadcasts, the broad adoption of the internet has further challenged the previous dominance of the medium. Toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were various criticisms of the quality of the news it presented, with critics suggesting it focused on salacious stories—similar to the focus of the penny press above—and used flashy visuals, quick cuts, doom-and-gloom stories, and breaking news banners to keep viewers engaged in the news broadcast, rather than providing in-depth and substantive reporting.

The internet caused a revolution in the way information was transmitted and who could produce and transmit the news, or other information, democratizing access and the ability to report on events. However, as with the above revolutions in technology and news, it took time to be fully realized. Previously, it had been noted in research that newspapers were responsible for creating a constant flow of information to consumers, which helped mold an individual's comprehension of society. That flow has since grown into a torrent of news, where news and information may reach consumers through traditional media, but the internet is increasingly the window and pipeline through which individuals receive their information and the context in which they understand society.

Most online news has moved from specific web pages that publish specific stories—such as the website of a given newspaper or news agency—toward platforms where any user can host their own page or site and publish their stories, with or without the restraints of journalistic ethics. These platforms came under increasing pressure as they widened the access an individual had to the global community, and vice versa, and therefore expanded the attack surface of an opposing nation to propagandize to a nation or cause social disorder through social engineering. Further, it opened an avenue for disinformation campaigns undertaken by foreign adversaries or individuals within a nation, increasing criticisms of these platforms and leading some to ask for these platforms to act as publishers and police their content, including news content, spread through the site.

Example of the equipment needed for the 1983 Viewtron.

One of the earliest attempts to use the internet for online news was a project launched by newspaper company Knight-Ridder in 1983. The company developed the Viewtron as one of the first systems designed to send electronic news directly to readers, giving customers access to stories before they could read them in the paper. But the costs were substantial and required a special keyboard and terminal and would fail as being too ahead of its time.

Early sign-in screen from Prodigy internet provider c. 1991.

By 1988, an internet provider, Prodigy, was offering news updates to subscribers' home computers when they signed on. But the revolution came in the early- to mid-1990s with the development of the World Wide Web. Some of the first to launch sites included news agencies CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., and these news outlets used to catering to a broad range of topics saw the internet as a chance to place their stories in front of people. The News & Observer developed Nando.net, an early online publication with a focus on sports news, offering readers a single place to get all of the scores of the evening rather than waiting for the morning paper.

One of the earliest impacts of the internet on shaping the news that was produced and published on it was the "nichefication" of the news. The web saw early news sites with specific interests begin to grow both in quantity and popularity. Rather than going to a single newspaper or news program for their information, the individual could go to multiple niche news websites to receive, arguably, more specialized news collection on a single topic. Another early trend that ran parallel to specialized niche websites was news aggregator sites, where a news site would gather what they considered to be the best stories from numerous sources in one place.

Example of the early Yahoo! page.

Since the early 1990s, newspaper circulation has declined sharply, and many newspapers began experimenting with internet technology as early as the late 1980s to ensure their survival. This was as newspaper executives were skeptical that the web presented a credible threat, and many newspapers and newspaper organizations held the new technology at arm's length. But as more people around the turn of the twenty-first century were online, they were greeted by home pages offered by their internet providers, or they set Google News or Yahoo! as their home page where they were given the day's biggest headlines before moving on through the web.

This would only accelerate with the development of the iPhone and the popularity of smartphones, where news consumption would move. At the same time, the explosive growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offered users a new place to discover and share news stories, giving journalists and news organizations immediate feedback on their stories and providing a place for journalists to shop their stories, if not dredge for stories.

Example of an early weblog from 1997.

Blogs would in many ways anticipate the ways news would be treated on social media, and would anticipate some social media sites that have been developed to offer a specific place to find news, or where news can be published when a traditional news outlet is uninterested stories, such as Medium or Substack. Blogs emerged in 1997 and 1998, known then as weblogs, but more broadly referred to as blogs. These came from early innovations, as early as 1994, where individuals were using web pages as tools for online diaries and personal commentaries. In 1997, Jorn Barger launched Robot Wisdom, which features lists of links Barger liked to visit and updates from Barger's life. Similar types of sites began to grow, as the original was a success, but would fail to attract large audiences.

Open Diary weblog c. 1998.

When blogs emerged, they served as an exchange network where users could share hyperlinks with one another and allow each other to identify and share information sources that could be of interest. Blogs struggled due to a high barrier of entry, as any user seeking to build and maintain a blog needed a sufficient amount of technological expertise. In late 1998, Open Diary was founded to offer users space on the web with free hosting and online publishing options developed to be user-friendly. The site would have 25,000 hosted online diaries, and the success of Open Diary saw a slew of other blogging sites launch through 1999. These blogs offered users a chance for writers and reporters to share their opinions and publish raw content outside of the bounds of journalistic routines and hierarchy. blogs also gave flexibility of publishing on a schedule and publishing content ranging from a few assembled sentences to complete, magazine-length features.

Friendster login page from around 2002.

Arguably the biggest change to the transmission and publication of news, anticipated by blogs, came with the rise of social media. One of the earliest social media sites was launched in 1997—SixDegrees.com—which allowed users to create profiles and connect with friends and is credited by some as the first social networking site (SNS). Numerous imitators would emerge that would innovate and develop social networking as a platform, such as the 2002 launch of Friendster. From 2003 onward, social media sites began to establish themselves as mainstream media platforms, especially with the development of Web 2.0 technology. These technologies are a class of platforms that enable consumer participation and interaction in online environments, including the discussion of and creation of the news.

Since this time, as more individuals have consumed their news from their mobile phones, and therefore through applications, more and more users have noted that social media has become the main source of news online. In a 2018 study about where users receive their news, especially "breaking news," the study found that 64.5 percent of users receive the news from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, or Instagram, rather than traditional media. And how individuals engage with the news can shape their view of the news they are presented, as an average user will read an article for fifteen seconds or less and watch a video for an average of ten seconds, rather than engaging with the news on a deeper level.

Early homepage of The Huffington Post.

With the explosion in the popularity of the internet, content began to be produced specifically for the new online format. This saw the launch and rise of popular news blogs such as Huffington Post, which launched in 2005, and included an interface driven by strong visual design and offering features allowing users to engage with the website through comments on stories. The rise of sites like this presented a clear challenge to traditional newspapers, but most newspapers did not meet this challenge, held down by their structural inertia, and the belief of many that they had already survived the challenges presented by radio and television, and the internet would be no different. For example, around 2005, there were roughly 269 blogs, 192 online communities, and 487 newspapers, but there was little interaction between bloggers and newspapers during this period, although there was a shift beginning.

In the next decade, beginning in 2010, the popularity of the internet continued to increase. One 2012 Pew Research Center study found 23 percent of Americans reported they went online for news at least three days a week in 2000; by 2010, that number had increased to 46 percent, and from that point forward it accelerated. Part of this came from the access households had to the internet, growing from 41.5 percent in 2010 to 71.1 percent in 2015, which saw an increase in the number of websites as they sought a piece of the growing online traffic.

In 2010, that traffic saw 7 percent of news media websites collecting 80 percent of the overall traffic, which, according to ComScore, would suggest the top online sources for news at the time in the United States included Yahoo!/ABC News Network, CNN, NBC News Digital, Huffington Post, and CBS, and the top newspaper website, USA Today, would come in sixth of these media companies in terms of unique visitors. This came while newspaper print circulation continued to slip—although the rate of decline slowed to less than 5 percent per year, while shifts in audience preferences had already occurred. Data from 2014 found 69 percent of Americans went on a computer for news, a further 56 percent accessed news from cell phones, and 29 percent accessed news on their tablets.

Image of Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein of ProPublica accepting Pulitzer Prize.

During this time, specifically 2014, USA Today experienced a 3.3 average daily print circulation compared to reaching 54.5 million users online; similarly, The New York Times maintained a daily circulation of 2.1 million but was able to drive revenue from their online presence, and is often considered one of the best examples of a newspaper developing a revenue model for online. Meanwhile, during this period, social media platforms became the largest portal through which consumers discovered news stories, while native news services continued to emerge to compete against those news services with various distribution schemes. In 2010, ProPublica would become the first online news service to win a Pulitzer Prize, which for some elevated the work of other online news services; but the news industry, even online, continued to be difficult, with as many online news services closing as opening.

However, the rise of digital news agencies and the diminishing of newspapers saw a collapse of local newspapers, where more of what were called "local" papers were groups of newspapers with aggregated stories that had little to do with the local community in which the paper was published, and even though the internet was seen as a chance to develop more hyper-local news, this did not emerge. And more often the digitization of the news, rather than offering an opportunity to develop hyper-local news and journalism, more and more of the news had either a niche news perspective or an overwhelmingly homogenized focus, with many stories offering a broad public appeal.

One result of the development and disruption of the internet in news has been the rise of so-called new media. Some of these types of new media are noted above, but they tend to be platforms that facilitate the production, dissemination, and exchange of content and can distribute that content within networks with interaction and collaboration. These news sources have been considered, by some, to have implications for democratic governance and political practices, including changing the way political leaders communicate, transforming the political media system, redefining the roles of journalists, and even changing the way citizens engage in politics.

However, drawing the line between new media and legacy media (newspapers, television broadcasting, and radio) has been considered, by some, as an exercise in futility as most legacy media have incorporated new media strategies into their reporting, and legacy media uses the new media platforms to distribute their material and communicate directly with their readers. However, unlike new media sources, legacy media news retains a certain aura of legitimacy due to its history of journalistic excellence and following journalistic ethics. Whereas new media, which can follow these same standards, does not carry with it the same history. New media also allows anyone with or without a history in journalism.

Further, new media sources can, and do, bring into prominence issues and events that may be outside of the purview or interest of mainstream journalism. However, some find new media has undercut the idealistic aims of the watchdog democratic press, with individuals participating in the new media disseminating a tremendous amount of trivial, unreliable, and polarizing information. Part of this is considered a problem of training, as trained journalists are supposed to be focused on uncovering facts around serious transgressions while others have leveled similar and same criticisms to legacy media outlets and their journalists participating in new media arenas, especially as both new media and legacy media outlets have been found guilty of publishing and distributing stories that are real, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated.

This emergence of new media and concerns around the quality of the information offered has led observers and critics to refer to the news media in the twenty-first century as the post-truth era. This refers to the amount of deception involved in everyday life, with people becoming desensitized to the implications of that deception and the increasing use of ambiguous statements with a kernel of authenticity (over even truth) being more common for the statements of politicians, reporters, corporate executives, or other power brokers. And objective facts have largely been seen to be subsumed by personal belief in shaping public opinion, while the American public has been found to have difficulty in distinguishing relevant news from extraneous clamor that fills media.

This is while the work of investigative journalists is found to be more insightful and informed as background research and the necessary resources for achieving that research have increased, offering these journalists greater access to government archives and big data analysis. But even these important, well-researched stories are prone to being obscured by the trivial, repetitive, and over-sensationalized "stories" that have come to dominate new and legacy media in the era of online news.

In the United States, the 2016 presidential election seemed like a watershed moment in the post-truth era, with much of the wider world media following the trend in the wake of the election. This election saw media accounts of the election infused with misinformation, baseless rumors, and outright lies. Further, false stories and unverified facts would be reported about by "new" media websites if not completely fabricated news sites and the social media accounts of candidates and their surrogates. Much of the presidential election and the coverage of the candidates, would end up focusing on much of these contrivances rather than on issues of policy, process, and governance.

Stephen Colbert and John Stewart, who each ran satirical news shows sometimes called 'fake news'.

Part of the post-truth era has been the growth of "fake news." The definition of what constitutes fake news has changed over time, with the term originally referring to news parodies and satires, such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. But during the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the concept of fake news was attached to the fictitious stories made to appear as if they were from legitimate news platforms or blogs, and the term was attached to reporting from legitimate news sources considered either unfavorable to one of the candidates or otherwise to reporting considered to be overly partisan.

The 'new fake news' outlet Infowars with embattled host Alex Jones.

During the emergence of fake news at this time, the continued tension between new media and legacy media was further incited, as legacy media routinely pointed to new media sources, such as Infowars, The Rightest, or National Report, and stories from their websites as common sources of fake news. But since 2016, the pressure on legacy media to continue to publish stories and keep eyes on their websites and encourage new subscribers saw these outlets begin to peddle stories of dubious origin. Part of this has come as news sources have come from outside government agencies seeking to increase political tensions in a given country and using the media to do this.

A lot of fake news has made use of social media interactions and algorithms to disseminate content to specific ideological constituencies. These stories, fabricated though they are, in their worst cases involve some nugget of truth to give the wider fabrications the feel of legitimate news, and they can be spread virally by social bots which, by masquerading as real people, can further increase the signal of a story and the story's seeming legitimacy. Often, besides a nugget of truth, fake news will be written to prey on people's preexisting beliefs about political leaders, parties, organizations, and concerns.

This has led to concerns over citizens' media literacy—their ability to critically parse through information and understand where a bias may exist or engage in disbelief when a story matches their personal beliefs. The ease with which fake news can be distributed through social media, social networking sites, and sites developed to look like official or real news websites can catch those with less media literacy, especially those with a bias in a certain direction that a fake news story seems to coincide with. This has further reduced trust in all news media, both new media and legacy media, with new media sources vilifying legacy media (while often trying to imitate the implied gravitas of legacy media) and legacy media equally vilifying the new media for being unserious.

Further, fake news and the new and legacy media going after each other, while playing on people's political bias, has further reduced the trust in science, let alone understanding what science being reported is real and what is using headlines to attract readers, but also sometimes misleading the readers, further reducing reader's trust in the media and in reported science.

News coverage from the Reagan administration and the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Amendment.

Many consider the rise of fake news to be a problem of the twenty-first century and a problem of the new media. However, criticisms of the press and their veracity have existed for as long as the news industry has existed. Part of this has been the way journalists and news organizations have characterized news. One such criticism focused on the way the news reported efforts in the United States to eliminate the federal deficit. The reporting focused on the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Amendment, which was considered an urgent need, while Congress and the Reagan administration were reported as heroic heroes in a painful struggle to contain government spending. But behind the reporting, the government was increasing spending and adding new programs, and the journalists failed to report on the amount the government added to the deficit.

This, and many other stories like this, led to the assertion by critics of the press to suggest that the news media (especially legacy media) created a charade with the government to mislead the public, including fabricating crises and stage-managing responses to give the media and the media consumers drama. Further, these critics have seen a culture grow, as early as the 1980s, where journalists and government officials have worked to support their goals, distorting the role of the journalist as a watchdog of the government to a patsy of the government, and leaving the consumer none the wiser for it.

Much of this, according to critics, has led in part to the attacks from legacy media on new media, especially when new media accounts tried to take aim at these established, legacy media outlets or the politicians and officials they are believed to be colluding with. While these attacks seemed to be aimed at news competitors, the increasing shift of news distribution to technology platforms has increased censorship concerns and threats to free speech not only of journalists and news media critical of government or legacy media but also of individuals engaging on those same platforms.

One development that has grown through the twenty-first century has been an increasingly partisan press. A partisan press, as noted above, is not new as the early newspapers, especially in the United States, were expected to be partisan, and it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that the goal of objectivity in the press was held up as not just an ideal, but as the goal of any modern journalism. This reduced opinion expression in reporting and saw more reporters and journalists focused on reporting the facts with minimal interpretation.

Example of a partisan newspaper from the nineteenth century.

The change came in the early twenty-first century with the development of new media. Although, in this part, the internet was an enabling technology, but not the main technology, as the earliest example, at least in the United States, came with satellite radio on which extreme right-wing commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh, were able to reach a national audience and talk about news stories with an extreme political bias. This early partisanship tended to work with real news stories and offered a partisan slant or partisan interpretation of the facts, often while ignoring any stories that went against their partisan bias.

However, as the twenty-first century has progressed, the partisanship has further increased and stretched to more media outlets, both new and legacy in some cases, while the partisanship increased as more news consumption further accelerated to more digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media and these news sources began developing stories out of almost thin air, as noted above, and exaggerating stories toward a biased perspective.

This has gone further, as the press has, according to some, moved toward working more as a mouthpiece for politicians rather than acting as a watchdog press and, in some cases, managing to walk the tightrope between both. This has led to an increasing study of news as an important and autonomous force in politics, and a force independent of political parties. This has been part of a movement toward what has been called a professionalization of political publicity, which looks at political communications and how publicity became a strategic weapon as early as the 1970s. This made use of the news media by lawmakers increasingly important and began cycles of positive reporting in return for access, also known as "pay for play" schemes, in which politicians can reduce journalist access in response to negative or unfavorable reporting.

One major concern with increasing partisanship in the press has been the division of individuals and their views of reality. As the news is often the way an individual meets and understands the world around them, especially with news readers increasingly moving online, means that reading a partisan and divided press, especially one that is unconcerned with the twentieth century's hallowed objectivity goal, has led to individuals living in the same city seeing the world entirely different, with varying concerns on a given day and different beliefs about what is happening in that same city. This has led to a growing disconnection between individuals living in the same area.

This is made difficult especially as a lot of new media news sources tend to report on the reporting of legacy media outlets, which continue to do the majority of leg work of traditional journalism, while new media sources tend to focus on the reporting of legacy media, and charging legacy media with an increasing partisanship, which can be debated, although there tend to be various examples for both partisanship and non-partisanship.

This has had surprising effects. One such effect has been an increasing amount of distrust in traditional organizations and authorities from certain groups. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 and 2021, an increasing amount of individuals stopped believing in the reported science based on the outlet or institution that was reporting the news, leading to different groups responding differently based on what news they were reading, putting some groups at a greater health risk than others.

Over the same period of time, data collected by various organizations, including Reuters, has shown a dramatic decline in trust in the news industry. A study of the news industry across six continents and in forty-six markets found that on average, trust in news has fallen to 42 percent, with Finland remaining the highest of the countries with a 69 percent of overall trust. The United States landed at the bottom with 26 percent of overall trust. Meanwhile, consumption of traditional media declined further across all markets, and online social consumption did not make up the gap, meaning more and more individuals are found to be walking away from the news, with interest in the news declining from 63 percent in 2017 to 51 percent in 2022. And the number of individuals reported as avoiding the news, often or sometimes, has increased across the countries, with selective avoidance over the same period doubling in countries such as Brazil and the UK.

As more people have walked away from consuming the news, with trust falling in the news industry and more groups treating legacy media as adversarial, there has been increasing concern about the sustainability and continuity of the news industry. The indifference toward news media has seen more news outlets losing revenue, especially as advertisers continue to spend their money elsewhere, while journalists have come increasingly under attack from governments, criminal groups, private lobbies, and individuals from the public. This has resulted in a period of time from 2016 to 2021 when UNESCO recorded the killing of more journalists who are killed for doing their work or on the job. Almost nine out of ten of those killings have been unresolved. Similarly, the same time period saw an increase in the online harassment experienced by journalists, and journalists covering protests, demonstrations, and riots have found themselves under attack more commonly.

These findings, among others, led UNESCO to make recommendations to fix the ability of journalists to perform their job and maintain a free and open press. One has included reducing or eliminating laws that use vague language or threaten disproportionate punishments for poorly understood actions, such as spreading "fake news," "rumors," or "cyber-libel," which has led to self-censorship, as well as defamation laws which, when criminal rather than civil, have been used as grounds to arrest journalists and silence their reporting.

Other recommendations have included supporting independent news media and the autonomy of journalists, allowing a greater number of news outlets to field journalists; devising programs to develop media and information literacy and help citizens understand the difference between reliable, verified information and unverified, or unreliable information; and enacting or reforming media laws to support free and pluralistic views, as many governments will support views that are favorable to them while working to repress outlets and journalists with dissenting views.

Many, though, do not believe the news media is doomed, rather that it will continue to go through transitions as consumers change their consumption behavior. The most positive outlook of this includes that, as newer generations grow up in a more caustic and pluralistic news environment, they will naturally understand how to parse through to authentic and verifiable news sources versus the rest. While others, less optimistically, believe news will continue to move toward content, blurring the trivial with the profound, and the false with the true, while consumers are buried in a torrent of content, and the news content they are served is based on the algorithms of various companies and platforms.