Well gollee Martin, everything you say here makes perfect sense.

I was born in 1951. I've seen it all, from Huntley-Brinkley to Walter Cronkite to Harry Reasoner to Eric Severeid , Paul Harvey to Johnny Carson to Merv Griffin to Sam Ervin to . . . all that mishmash that happened in the '80's, 90's, Ted Koppel, Geraldo Rivera . . . then came the polarizing ages, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow etcetera etcetera etcetera and . . .

Your analysis is profoundly accurate.

Then Twitter and Facebook destroyed it all!

or at least, knocked it all down a peg or two on the pecking order of modern consciousness.

As for investigative journalism, that function isperformed now by Congressional committees, with their cheering squad at WaPo.

But I do have to say that WaPo is still making a gallant efffort to fulfill its ongoing Woodward and Bernstein mission of saving Washington from itself and saving America from insurrectioning Republicans.

Meanwhile NYT keeps plugging along, decade after decade with all the news thats fit to print while the rest of the world uses print for fish-wrap or nostalgic fix for us old boomers who still remember having lunch in a diner while reading the Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution as the world slowly gravitated to Huffington moments in Starbux wifi with morning coffee until all the javas became overpriced dessert treats accompanied by Apple strudel, Microsoft liftoff and then plummeting down to the handheld revolution brought in by Steve Jobs, leaving Woz as a fading memory in a silicon dream . . .

NPR went solid left-center while Fox went whacko right and donald trump taught flyover-country goodoleboys how to be badass upstarts and public discourse got tossed out to the landfill with all the plastic fantastic my country tis of thee sweet land of liberty, of thee I weep while the handheld devices instantaneously with a swipe of the fingertip sweep away our long-lost .gov of/for/by the peeple out to yonder landfill while the beast creeps toward Donbas or Donaltrump crumbling america in his hand while my guitar gently weeps.