(46) Many journalism critics have recently argued that American journalism is undergoing a profound change because it now regularly mixes entertainment with the news. Critics typically argue that this entertainment is in the form of sensationalistic celebrity-scandal. In fact, there is a long history of sensationalism in American journalism, a fact documented by several journalism historians. (47) But the main point of contemporary critics is that sensationalism and tabloid-style techniques, which were always present on the fringes of journalism, are now becoming the norm in American journalism, and are being adopted by so-called "mainstream" media as part of economic survival strategies in the cutthroat business climate of American mass media. These contemporary critics typically argue that there should be a rigid boundary between mainstream journalism and other kinds of mass communication such as tabloid journalism. (48) The critics imply that one kind of communication is more legitimate in certain contexts than the other, and even that tabloid journalism is not journalism at all but is instead entertainment. One of the claims made by mass media critics is that journalism just recently got worse. But this may be a perennial complaint.
(49) A quick review of journalism criticism reveals that the argument that journalism used to be better but just recently got worse is common throughout the history of journalism. The critiques usually say that journalism used to make bold distinctions between news and entertainment but now combines the two. These critiques construct the logical conclusion that journalism has steadily declined in quality over many years. (50) Taken together, the criticisms add up to the conclusions that the people who used to do journalism were better and had higher standards than those of today and that the distinctions between news and entertainment used to be greater. Examples of this critique can be found in even the earliest discussions of American journalism.
For instance, critics panned Benjamin Day’s New York Sun of the early 1830s because it often contained humor and sensational news of suicides. Similarly, some critics hated James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald of the mid-to late-1830s because it contained entertaining satirically written police court reports, as well as in-depth crime stories. Bennett pioneered the "human-interest story" or feature story when he wrote in vivid detail in 1836 about the grisly murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, quoting her madam and describing Jewett’s apartment in minute detail. Bennett’s day-by-day narrative of the ensuing sensational trial reminds us of how journalism and entertaining literature have been combined for many years to make newsworthy stories "more palatable for consumption. " Bennett was soundly criticized by his competitors and others for blurring the boundary between journalism and entertainment. His detractors, many of them his competitors, waged what they called a "Moral War" in the late 1830s against Bennett and his enjoyable but sensationalistic newspaper. They maintained that Bennett was a "deviant" journalist because he blurred the boundaries of journalism by making his newspaper entertaining and popular. Those running the "Moral War" against Bennett were unsuccessful at running him out of the journalism business, but they did seriously wound his business.