Since people first were able to use language and press letters in clay there have been stories of current events. The circulation of news by the king's heralds gave way to the publication of news on hand-printed parchments, on paper printed with hand-set type and then with sticks of type moulded by the glorified typewriters called Linotype machines and printed on rotary presses. From the beginning, advertising revenue was the life-blood of a newspaper.
When rails spread across Western Canada, every railway town of any consequence had a newspaper. The smallest ones were one-man operations. The owner was publisher, editor, reporter, typesetter, pressman, circulation manager and office boy. He probably printed from two to four pages on a flat-bed press. These were fattened by what was called "boiler plate" - features and stale news and advertising provided by companies that gained their revenues from their association with the small local journals.
The editor-publisher of the village paper had to be careful. He couldn't afford to offend the village establishment. His most important offering was the local and personal column, an innocuous account of the doings of citizens who liked to see their names in print. He was never a court reporter because miscreants bought papers, too.
In the age of computers and instant communication, the technology of news gathering has changed but its underlying patterns have not. Old-time newspapermen would be aware of how the electronic media, especially CNN, "milk" their stories. In the recent past, CNN concentrated on brutal violence of the conflict in Syria that resulted in thousands of deaths and the flight of millions of refugees. The issues there were still unresolved when CNN turned to the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner with fewer than 300 people on board. It was a mystery and a tragedy and it was "milked" for weeks. CNN then noted as "breaking news" the killings here and there by gun toting madmen. Only a few people were murdered. The story of the conflict in Ukraine and the kidnapping of girls from a Christian school by Islamic extremists also involved only a relatively small number of people.
For days now, CNN has been airing the story of a single American soldier, a former prisoner of the Taliban who may also have been a deserter. From the sorry plight of millions to the plight of one man is for the electronic media only a matter of degree. People are still being killed in Syria and there are still over a million displaced people in the Palestine refugee camps, people and the descendants of people who once lived in the land that is now the state of Israel. These are not good stories, now. They don't attract viewers. The electronic media are doing what the small-town editors did. They are keeping up their circulation and advertising revenues. This is not to say their stories are inexpertly told or tinged with falsehoods. It is a matter of degree. What they emphasize may be far less important to humankind than the stories they don't tell.
