How much the Press and media have changed in 74 years. Not only has style and content changed dramatically in that time, it’s method of delivery has made it unrecognizable between today and the way we took it for granted in 1950.
It would seem in 1950 there were infinitely more avenues of getting news than there are now. Certainly the speed with which a story travels from event to report now takes minutes or even seconds to reach the audience than it did in 1950. But even then it was evolving. Radio (and to a lesser degree Television) were making access to events faster now than even five years earlier. Newspapers and Magazines, once the lifeblood of news gathering were slowly being left behind in favor of an audience who wanted information instantly, if not sooner.
But for all the vast improvements being touted and promised, we were ironically finding less and less sources for reliable information than even five years earlier. Newspapers, including many which had long and prestigious histories were being taken over by companies who owned numerous publications in many other cities in America. News was becoming consolidated, magazines were simply going out of business or changing formats entirely. The wide range of journalistic style was being overtaken by a sort of “one size fits all” approach – and places like New York and (for obvious reasons) Washington D.C. were focal points. So too, was the focus/responsibility of the news media and journalism in general. In America it was evenly divided between hard journalism and “info-tainment”, a focus on more Popular Culture, than events of a national or International importance.
Prior to 1950, news gathering was regarded as a means to inform, educate and help formulate rational opinions on events of the day. Entertainment and Popular Culture reporting were viewed as a different universe, many lightyears away from the pressing life-or-death events the world was dealing with.
Over time, those lines began to blur. This program, part of the series London Forum broadcast by the BBC World Service discusses those changing attitudes from a 1950 standpoint – long before the era of takeovers, buyouts and wholesale destruction of newsrooms. Few would have imagined the current state of the Press and Media in general in 2024. It seems ironic that in an age of massive technological advances, the end result has been a spectacularly uniformed and apathetic public.
To get some idea where we were in 1950 and what issues mattered to America (and Britain) at the time, here is that episode of London Forum, as it was broadcast by the BBC World Service on November 20, 1950.
