HERE IS WHERE THE WORLD CHANGED

by Bob Walsh

Every now and again it is possible to point to a specific spot in time and say HERE. THIS is where it happened. This is where the way in which the world works was changed. I have been witness two a couple of them.

One of them was November 22, 1963. Up until that time most Americans got their main dose of news from print media. Any decent size city had a daily newspaper. Large cities often had two, a morning paper and an evening paper. A few very large cities had several. Large papers had international bureaus in places like London or Paris. Decent size papers had a D.C. bureau. People read news weekly publications like Time or Newsweek.

Then JFK was assassinated. At that time it was just beginning to be technically possible to do live news broadcasts from the field. It wasn't one reporter and a guy with a handicam. It was a truck with generators, cables and about six support staff hooked into a camera that one strong man could lift onto a tripod that took one strong man to carry. But it worked. That one day in history began a shift from print media to broadcast media and has led to the disintegration and near destruction of print news. Few cities now have more than one daily newspaper. Some large cities have no print media at all.

Another one was January 17, 1998. One that day a news amalgamator on the internet named Drudge and his one employee, Breitbart, ran a story about Monica Lewinski and William Jefferson Clinton. Two major print outlets had already spiked the story (including Newsweek.) From that day 20 years ago we have now gone into a 24 hour news cycle where many people get ALL of their news from Yahoo or Google. Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley are dim memories of a forgotten history. Getting it FAST is often (though not always) more important than getting it right. Drudge started a chain of events that led directly to the impeachment of a President.

I am not sure if this change is for the better or worse. I still like and read newspapers. I still watch mainstream media broadcast news. Maybe I am a dinosaur. But I can't deny the world has changed. And I do, from time to time, look at Yahoo News and Drudge.