> The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory.
Nah. The difference is that fact-checking and reading multiple sources is way easier these days.
Re:Why media layoffs keep happening
by cljs-js-eval on Friday January 25, 2019 @10:09AM
(#18998563)
Yup. It was arguably even worse before. Pulitzer himself ran fake news about the Spanish in Cuba as propaganda to support the Spanish-American War:
By the time [Joseph Pulitzer] actually composed his thoughts for the North American Review, his bed chart included rheumatism, dyspepsia, catarrh and a bad case of shame for the Spanish atrocities in Cuba deliberately invented by his reporters to goose the circulation of his newspapers. - Michael Lewis (1)
[1] Michael Lewis, "J School Confidential", 1993 [2] David R. Spencer, "The Yellow Journalism", 2007
> There hasn't been a time when the media haven't been biased and often knowingly dishonest.
Perhaps, but surely the media used to be less biased, and itβs worth striving to get back to that place.
When?
In my lifetime less the last decade. For instance, during the Iraq war, it wasn't uncommon for NYT or other publications to take a moderate right-wing perspective. Now that's virtually unheard of outside of the opinion section, and even there it's only token "conservatives" (quotes because "conservative" means a lot of different things to different people in the era of Trump).
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinoviev_letter
...Which was 95 years ago.
The difference now that is the rhetoric is often more obviously slanted and more likely to be nakedly inflammatory.
The 50s/60s/70s had more of a tradition of restrained debate. But the politeness was always superficial. Politics was at least as murderous and corrupt as it is now. But the more measured tone, and the superficial respect for critique and analysis, made it appear more civilised.
Now the tone is more likely to be extreme, which creates the illusion that obviously manipulative "fake news" is more the rule than the exception - and that this is historically different, when in fact it isn't at all.