ABSTRACT
The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of "public journalism", also called "civic journalism", which was a movement by which news media tried to encourage broader public discourse and civic engagement. For the most part, the targets of the commission's criticism-mainstream news media-were skeptical, and at first the Hutchins Report was met with either tepid curiosity or outright hostility from working journalists. As electronic media helped to create many new channels for audience feedback, the ink-on-paper press did not give up on traditional letters to the editor. The generations who followed were often raised in luxury and had little real-world knowledge of the struggles and conditions faced by the working-class people who read their newspapers or tuned in to their radio stations. They were socio-economic elites referred to as "press barons" by their critics, especially during the severe socio-economic divisions of the Great Depression.
