Not so long ago, the press was highly deferential to those in high office. For example, President Kennedy had numerous affairs, and the press knew about them, but did not report them to the public. Queen Mary, the grandmother of the present Queen, smoked cigarettes and died of lung cancer, but when she died, the cause of death was reported to be gastric problems. While most people knew that Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio, the press, most of the time, refrained from taking pictures of his withered legs.Then, all of a sudden, the press turns around. The Pentagon Papers are published. Princess Diana is hounded mercilessly. Walter Cronkite, who was the male equivalent to Jane Fonda, goes to Vietnam, misinterprets the results of the Tet offensive, and demoralizes the American people, thereby giving great aid and comfort to our enemy, North Vietnam. Oh, and don't forget Watergate, when the press hounded Nixon out of office.So what happened? When, where, and why did the press change like that?
It's the job of the Press to report the truth. Doing so is not traitorous; if the Press is just going to cover up or ignore the failings of the rich, powerful,and famous, we may as well have let USSR win the Cold War.
First, Nixon was hardly hounded out of office - he put himself above the law and paid the price. As to the media of today it is driven by the 24/7 news channels and the internet. Not that either one is inherently bad, but the press is certainly different than it was even 10 years ago. There will be a press, but much different. The press writes about items today that are pretty much like local news stations if it bleeds, it leads - how sad. Most presidents have had the right to lead a life like anyone else - this is no longer true. Every piece of dirty laundry is going to be exposed. It is what the general public wants and if they want it someone will supply it. Newspapers did not do themselves any favor when they published Pulitzer Prize winning stories only to find out they were total fabrications. Yes, of all of them you first mentioned Kennedy's escapades were an eye opener. After that it was like why do we have to respect anyone who thinks their position gives them license, simply because they hold a position of real power, to crawl in the gutter when the desire strikes.
I think 'turned traitor' is much too strong for this context. It is more a sign of changing times and technology and good manners. It is the job of the press to figure out things, and report this to the public. What you describe is what happened when left wing moralists got important enough jobs within the press to make moral judgments. Especially with regard to Cronkite and Watergate. Any information not fitting the popular image was filtered away. That continues until the day of today, and MUCH more in Europe than would be acceptable in the USA. But this attitude is a sword with two sides. It works just as well the other way. The environmentalists were the first to discover the powers of a free press on the Internet. Not the newspapers and the media, they behaved as required. The Internet changed almost everything. You know something was wrong, you could have told your friends, who probably agreed, maybe write a letter to the newspaper - which wouldn't be published. And that was all you could do. Now you see a politically correct item on an online newspaper with several thousand comments opposing the article. People carry pones with cameras and don't hesitate to place something on Youtube. Or open a web site or blog and report about it, with thousands of people responding to it. It used to be that the the left was able to muzzle the conservative voice. But no longer. When did the press turn traitor, as you describe it? About the time of the Vietnam war. Young left wing university graduates got jobs, and worked from there upwards. Not just in the USA, but even more so in Europe. The left progressive opinion took hold after the 1968 riots and became politically acceptable. Until very recent, they kept that power.
In my opinion (I'm a retired newspaper reporter and editor) the press hasn't changed very much; it's the readership that has changed. Newspapers must sell papers to live. To sell papers, they must report what people want to read about. Several so-called good news newspapers have tried to present only good news, but they all died an early death, simply because the readership wasn't interested in good news enough to buy that paper. I really don't see it as the press's fault that times, tastes,and ideology have all changed profoundly since FDR and JFK's days. But the readership -- yes. Definite change.
Traitor is a subjective term, and the behavior in which you are providing examples of have been around since free press but most certainly not definitively treasonous. Treason within United States Constitutional law, cannot be used lightly by any authority and only with Congressional demand to do so. Outside the American Civil War, treason was most often a subject of the McCarthy era and the even earlier (and just as controversial) Alien and Sedition Acts. As it may be recalled though, the late United States president Andrew Jackson had his *wife* openly mocked by the press during the mud slinging election of 1828. Colorful (if sometimes incredibly offensive) political comics were also distributed in addition to libelous print during the same era. The very Kennedy you mentioned was also violently criticized for simply being Catholic by the media. That the press did not attempt and run with anything else was perhaps also because such episodes were kept effectively secret in the same manner that president Roosevelt went to extreme lengths to keep his crippling disease hugely private. Often the latter went so far as to have special *trains* constructed to enable him to move without getting out of his limo. Though positive coverage is not necessarily 'good': Wars tend to get rosy coverage to begin with (which even occurred in Vietnam), and the first reports of the First World War routinely mentioned the conflict was to end quickly and bloodlessly. The German public was even surprised when their host nation surrendered, as all was well to their knowledge. Scandalous print is not a product of today or in resurgence, it's simply ignored often for selective benefit for the same reason violent television is falsely referred to as a modern phenomenon in spite of the, 'Cowboys Vs. Indians' trope. Case in point: One need only look at the often tasteless headlines of the New York, Daily News to remove any doubt that such material was ever published.
