From The Context.

Trust in news media has been at historic lows for almost a decade.

THE CONTEXT looks at some big failures in news media the past few years and discusses some of the underlying root causes to those failures.

The internet has made the news in America more competitive than it’s been in over 100 years. Ambitious, upstart news outlets will publish fake, misleading, or unverified news that earns clicks and shapes the broader conversations around the news. Cable news engages unverified news or it suffers the consequences of lost viewership.

This isn’t even the worst moment in American news media. In the 1890s and 1900s, the news was hyper-partisan and was fueled by false and misleading stories designed to grab the attention of pedestrians walking past a newsboy or a newsstand. THE CONTEXT looks at how that moment in history informs today’s current news ecosystem.