Changing audience forces media to change their ways
             It's no secret. During the past 40 years, the trust that was once invested in the media has slowly declined. In a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization in November 2000, journalists and reporters were given an average to low rating for honesty and ethical standards. Professions ranked lower than newspaper reporters in this poll were insurance salesmen, advertising practitioners and car salesmen.
             Those who think that the media have become bias and partisan also believe that the lack of journalistic objectivity caused the decrease in the media's audience. However, a study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Medill News Service Washington Bureau suggests that it was the diminishing audience that caused a change in the style of journalistic writing.
             According to David Mindich in his book 'Just the Facts: How 'Objectivity' Came to Define American Journalism,' "objectivity" has been an issue since 1690. Although it may not have applied to journalism before the 20th century, "objectivity" was alive and well when Benjamin Harris declared in Publick Occurrences, North America's first newspaper, his intention to provide "a Faithful Relation" of "considerable things as have arrived unto our Notice."
             American newspapers did not unhinge from their formal party ties, Katz says, until the 1830s. In the 1890s, the ethic of "objectivity" is applied to journalism, and the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics highlighted "objectivity" as its central tenet when it was founded in 1909.
             The introduction of the radio in the 1920s took from newspapers' audiences, but it didn't have nearly the same impact as the invention of television in the late 1940s. This was a blow from which the newspaper industry still has not fully recovered.
             ...