The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect

Ownership of major news outlets is becoming increasingly concentrated among a few mammoth corporations that don't have as their primary purpose the dissemination of news. This places on journalists corporate pressures with which their predecessors were largely unfamiliar. And it forces publications and television programs to become more entertaining, even at the expense of informing. The authors point out, for example, that Time and Newsweek are about seven more times likely to run the same cover story as People than they were about 20 years ago.