There was less place in a newsroom for veteran journalists to serve as mentors for inexperienced kids who came poorly trained from journalism schools taught by theorists who never covered a fire or met a deadline. And more Americans read those than read the metro dailies. The larger the paper the less likely the full damaging effect. But even the metros have not escaped entirely from this body blow that technology has inflicted upon the profession of journalism. Many readers who have rightly grown not to trust their newspapers blame it on what they perceive as an intellectual bias.
Conventional wisdom is that most of that list is to the left.
There is some truth to that, although newspapers have always been under attack for one kind of bias or another. And they did ask, or order. The perception here, after having worked in or close to newspaper journalism for nearly half a century, is that most newspaper owners are unabashed capitalists, with predictable political views of the world. In the end, it is the owners, through their vicars, the publishers, who control the direction and degree of any bias. So, now comes along the Internet, with all its undisputed and scarcely discovered opportunities.