Back in the mid 90's, a neighbor of mine was working on her masters degree in journalism. The topic was regarding race relations in the US and how it was reported in the news.

Starting in 1990, the amount of coverage of racial tensions started increasing, while crime data showed a real decrease in the actual number of real race related crime (which had been decreasing for several years). The paper basically showed that after the fall of PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER., there was less 'hard' news that people really cared about. This coupled with the increase in news channels (cable) drastically lowered the bar for what qualified as 'news'.

This is even more true today. I don't feel the world is fundamentally worse off today that it was 30 years ago, but back then, if a husband killed his wife and kids 3000 miles away, it was maybe an inch of news on page 34 of the paper and never mentioned on TV at all. Now we are getting all the details in real time.

When I was a kid, there was an incident where 2 cops got killed and the killer took off and hid for 2 weeks in the corn fields. Today that manhunt would be headline news for a few days. Back then, people that lived more 100 miles away didn't know anything had ever happened.