Fortune Archives: An American media in crisis, from the 1970s to today

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“In the long run, it would seem, something will have to give: the effectiveness of government, the ability of public opinion to control it, the freedom of the press, or the character of the journalism it currently practices.”

This rather dark prediction, from a 1975 Fortune feature on the “New Journalism,” feels eerily prescient today. Among the many lessons of Donald Trump’s resounding victory in the recent U.S. presidential election is the mainstream press’s increasing irrelevance among a growing cohort of American voters.

Trump’s success spinning perception of himself has helped propel him to the White House—and left journalists to ponder our looming obsolescence in Americans’ increasingly algorithmically determined media landscape.

Discussions of an American press crisis are hardly new; as this 1975 piece highlights, journalists have long struggled against hostile audiences and governments. The story describes a seismic shift in the industry underway at the time: the creation of a more centralized, national press, run by educated elites who were not content writing strictly the facts and sticking to the “conventions of objectivity.” Instead, they wanted to cover larger societal trends and explicitly call out political deceit. This was leading to problems, the unsigned article asserts, including the “deliberate politicization of news” and a challenging environment for government and business leaders to get their perspectives across.

The media’s credibility had taken a major hit: “Opinion polls reveal a more or less steady decline in public respect and trust accorded the news media (as well as all other institutions) since the early 1960’s,” the story points out—and that trend has only continued since. All signs suggest that the next presidential administration will be shrouded in distrust of institutions and a disdain for experts and elites, in the media and beyond.

Robert L. Bartley, editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal, told Fortune back in ’75 that “[t]he press is very likely freer than it ever has been.” But he warned: “The problem is that we’re at the end of one pendulum swing, and we worry about how far it will go when it swings back the other way.”

The pendulum is certainly in motion again. How far it swings and what that will mean for the American press remains to be seen.