I wasn’t aware of how long this watering down of the news to increase ad profitability has been in progress:

The evolution of journalism in the twentieth century was away from hard news aimed at citizens and toward what media critic Ben Bagdikian called “fluff” aimed at consumers and designed to attract ads. Bagdikian found that hard news made up about four pages of the average daily newspaper in 1940, and that while editions had more than doubled in size forty years later, most of the increase consisted of fluff since the amount of hard news had grown to only about five pages. “Most fluff is wanted by advertisers to create a buying mood,” noted Bagdikian, who added that surveys showed readers wanted more hard news. “An article on genuine social suffering might interrupt the ‘buying mood’ on which most ads for luxuries depend.” Fluff matched perfectly Marshall McLuhan’s description of media content as “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

Hard news came to be avoided by newspapers because not only did it not attract ads—it repelled them. Newspapers arguably crossed the Rubicon in the 1930s, when they suppressed news of studies that linked cigarette smoking to cancer because tobacco companies were among their biggest advertisers. That opened the door for other advertisers to demand the removal of news that might hurt their business. Air Canada, noted Bagdikian, warned newspapers in 1978 that “its ads would be canceled as long as any news story of an Air Canada crash or hijacking ran in the paper and if its ads were carried within two pages of a news story of any crash or hijacking on any airline.” This new advertiser sensitivity to news perhaps triggered a move toward even more ad-friendly content, and newspapers weren’t shy about promoting it to ad buyers.