Tony Blair recently had this to say about the news media (excerpted):

• First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light.
  
• Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.
  
• Third, the fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.
  
• Fourth, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than the news itself. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean. This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims.
  
• a fifth point: the confusion of news and commentary. Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism. But opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course. In other words, this is not exceptional. It is routine.
  
  The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grey is almost entirely absent. "Some good, some bad"; "some things going right, some going wrong" - these are concepts alien to today's reporting. It's a triumph or a disaster. A problem is "a crisis". A setback is a policy "in tatters". A criticism, "a savage attack".

Comments (on the content, not on the speaker)?

Newspapers even have their own special words that are rarely used outside of their special world:

Fury, rage, drama, horror, nightmare, shock.

"If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention." [H D Thoreau]

"Hardly a man wakes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. "Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man any where on this globe", -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself." [H D Thoreau, Walden, ch. 2.]

First, a couple of political points. Blair used the Press remorselessly, not least when he was in Opposition and whipped up a mood of national hysteria about the "sleaze" of John Major's Conservative government. We did not hear him complain about the Press's attitudes then. It can also be argued that when he took office he allowed his Government to use some very gamey tactics when it came to planting stories with favoured newspapers (often Murdoch titles) and spreading rumours about opponents of his regime (eg David Kelly, a Government scientist who consequently took his own life).
On the matter of newspaper style, "crucial" is a word to watch. It is used commonly in the sports pages to describe a "crucial" fixture. These are only games. The whole idea of sport is surely to get away from deadly importance. Yet "crucial" keeps sprouting!

quote:

mood of national hysteria about the "sleaze" of John Major's Conservative government

It's interesting that this all happened when there was little or no evidence of improper behaviour - certainly not on John Major's part.

It was only later that it was discovered that he had been having a long-running affair with Edwina Currie. I am convinced that, had his peccadilloes come to light before the election, he'd have been re-elected