History of Journalism: 1995 to Present

Broadcast Industry Transformations

Until the 1990s, CBS, NBC, and ABC largely predominated in the broadcast television business in the United States. But in 1985, their power began to wane when Rupert Murdoch started the Fox network. Over the next decade, Fox slowly developed a group of affiliates and debuted prime-time programming. In 1996, Fox's parent company got into the news business when it started Fox News Channel. Fox News grew slowly after its mid-90s debut, but by 2007 it was rated as the cable news network with the largest number of regular viewers.

Critics of Fox News accused it of being biased toward the political right and Republican ideologies at the expense of neutrality. Murdoch and his associates disagreed. Selecting “Fair and Balanced” as Fox's trademarked slogan, Murdoch claimed the channel's news and opinion were more balanced than those of its competitors.

Like the broadcast television industry, after 1995, radio was likewise forced to adjust to technological innovation. Emerging technologies allowed radio station owners to cut back on the number of people they employed, and much of the news aired on commercial radio was purchased rather than produced locally. AM radio grew in popularity among listeners eager to hear from conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus. Public radio news programs remained popular among many Americans looking for fuller treatments of the events of the day.

With its 1997 decision to license satellite radio, new opportunities for radio news journalists were born. The first satellite radio leaders, XM and Sirius, started transmitting music, news, sports, and other content across the globe to its subscribers in late 2001 and early 2002. In 2004, XM began offering radio channels featuring local weather and traffic reports. The two companies merged in 2008 after the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission approved their request.

Web Revolution

The relationship between journalism and newer technologies starts long before 1995. During the 1980s, the development of many new media, including the Internet, accelerated thanks to computers and modes of transmission that increased speed, lowered cost, and expanded capacity.

By the mid-1990s, almost all aspects of newsroom operation, including production, layout, composition, circulation, and the newspaper archives, were computerized; and the potential of computer networking for journalism was increasingly recognized. In the 1980s, a handful of newspaper and broadcast journalists started dial-up bulletin board systems on the Internet. Most resulted from partnerships with budding dial-up platforms such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. [Page 714]Standard journalistic fare on such bulletin boards included classified ads, business and entertainment listings, and a few headlines. In 1991, the Chicago Tribune Company invested in America Online. A year later, it launched Chicago Online on AOL with localized stories and other content.

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