LizzieMaine
Bartender
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"If it bleeds it leads" was a saying that originated in television news in the '70s, and still pretty much epitomizes the way it's done now. It's a big reason I got out of journalism.
There was plenty of reporting of grim news in the Era, you just needed to know where to look for it: many special-interest magazines and newspapers of the period were relentless in reporting stories the big media censored or overlooked. During the early years of the war, before the US became involved, it was fashionable among certain types of people to dismiss the news out of Germany and Asia as reported by these publications as "atrocity propaganda." Such so-called media sophisticates found out a few years later just how wrong they were.
As for sleazy crime stories and the like, any city with a tabloid newspaper or two covered every kind of degeneracy ad nauseum, some in ways that would make readers of today cringe in terror. When I was posting "This Day In History" front pages from my newspaper collection a few years ago, there were several that I deliberately skipped over for fear of offending the sensibilities of the Lounge's readers -- such as a New York Daily News front page from 1936 reporting on the death of a kidnapped boy by covering the entire front page of the paper with a full-length photo of his bloody corpse sprawled in a snowbank.
There was plenty of reporting of grim news in the Era, you just needed to know where to look for it: many special-interest magazines and newspapers of the period were relentless in reporting stories the big media censored or overlooked. During the early years of the war, before the US became involved, it was fashionable among certain types of people to dismiss the news out of Germany and Asia as reported by these publications as "atrocity propaganda." Such so-called media sophisticates found out a few years later just how wrong they were.
As for sleazy crime stories and the like, any city with a tabloid newspaper or two covered every kind of degeneracy ad nauseum, some in ways that would make readers of today cringe in terror. When I was posting "This Day In History" front pages from my newspaper collection a few years ago, there were several that I deliberately skipped over for fear of offending the sensibilities of the Lounge's readers -- such as a New York Daily News front page from 1936 reporting on the death of a kidnapped boy by covering the entire front page of the paper with a full-length photo of his bloody corpse sprawled in a snowbank.
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