Fox News Channel’s ballyhooed resistance to President Barack Obama’s selection as a Nobel Peace Price recipient was nothing out of the ordinary for Rupert Murdoch and company. Fox indignantly denied any charge of biased reporting, of course, yet proceeded to allow Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck to continue sputtering neoconservative vitriol all over television sets tuned in to the “fair and balanced” cable news network.

Fox has been a caricature of objective news reporting for years, but sometime during its successful spin game, network rivals decided to join the party. MSNBC anointed Keith Olbermann the face of its network, and leftist liberals like Rachel Maddow earned more airtime and hour-long shows. CNN, pinned in the middle, has been forced to adopt a populist message to cater to another faction of eyeballs attentively focused on television screens.

What has this left us in the realm of cable news? A bunch of channels that claim objectivity and fair-mindedness when they are anything but, and a comedy network that does a better job of reporting the facts than the shows it parodies.

Meanwhile, print journalism is dying. Magazines are struggling to stay afloat and newspapers are tightening their belts — The New York Times just announced plans to cut 100 newsroom jobs.

Sadly, this oldest living medium of news — before radio, television and Internet — is still the most reliable and objective source for someone seeking facts, depth reporting and transparency. And it’s dying a slow, painful death.

Why does no one read newspapers anymore?

Yes, it’s cheaper, more convenient and more accessible to rely on cable news or the Internet, but with the advances in technology, the quality of reporting has become diluted. In the rush to break news on air (or online) special qualities found in old-fashioned hard copy are lost. Precision and depth analysis is sacrificed, and often editors, who check and recheck everything multiple times for print publications, are cut out of the equation.

To be fair, it’s not really broadcast journalism’s fault newspapers are dying. It’s more due to broadcasts’ adolescent, effervescent younger brother — the Internet.

And the Internet is maturing into young adulthood. Newspapers and magazines are living out their golden years, relegated to some retirement home seldom visited.

Technology marches on, undeterred by the inadvertent consequences it has on the way we gather and disseminate news. With all the buzz of Apple releasing the fabled “iTablet” next year, portable computing will become easier and more pervasive than ever. As Twitter and news apps take over as routine sources of news, print publications will continue to be pushed to the side, an archaic and obsolescent reminder of how news used to be absorbed.

But print publications will not go quietly into the night. Hopefully, the quality of newspaper reporting and magazine writing won’t be sacrificed as they try to appeal to a changing audience. They will try to survive.

Whether or not they do is up to us.

Reach Dustin at dustin.volz@asu.edu.