Surveys revealed that what readers really wanted were anecdotal trend stories, whimsical lifestyle pieces and 20-minute recipes.
Well, the reader survey business was certainly dumb, but the grandeur of investigative journalism is also something of a myth. Last summer, I was chatting with a former colleague, who told me how surprised he had been, years before, when he was working on one of those big investigative series, at how dismayed the editor in charge was when the facts unearthed did not strongly support the thesis that had served as the working hypothesis for the series - and how the editor made sure those particular facts were played down. Had newspapers been impartial and dispassionate in their investigations, letting the chips fall where they might, then those series would really have been indispensable. Their tendentiousness, however, has long been obvious.
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