News Lite.

In the 1990s the line between serious journalism and tabloid reporting blurred substantially. Supermarket tabloids such as the National Enquirer, Star, and Weekly World News broke and reported top news stories, and more and more the stories that appeared in print and television news began to look like reports from the National Enquirer. In fact, Inside Edition won a Polk Award for a piece on abuses in the insurance industry in Arkansas, and major networks provided almost nonstop coverage of the woes of Michael Jackson, O. J. Simpson, Patsy and John Ramsey, and Bill Clinton. News anchor Dan Rather called this trend toward the sensational "news lite." On the one hand, Americans assailed the journalistic world for reporting the sordid details, of Clinton's sex scandal, for example, and yet they could not seem to get enough of them. The decade ended with...