Newspapers ignored inconvenienent facts all the time, probably for all of human history. Even when they don't completely ignore some facts, they often choose to make a big deal of some facts and not of others.
Some examples of the former would be the missing reporting on the US atrocities in South America, except maybe the Contra deal. The 100 catholic priests murdered in SA by US or US-supported troops were never mentioned, but the Soviet murder of 1 priest was an international scandal (as well it should be, but the others should have been an even bigger scandal).
A very good example of the latter should be the COINTELPRO[1] revelation of the FBI actively seeking to blackmail and even assassinate members of civil rights groups, including an attempt to convince MLK to commit suicide, threatening to reveal his extra-marital affairs otherwise. This was reported to some extent, but then Watergate happened at around the same time, and, despite being much less worrying for normal people, it became one of the largest scandals in media, and COINTELPRO was forgotten from public discourse.
There's the matter of both motive and degree. Of course newsprint journalism always had its issues (heh). Of course there's always been various struggles to rise to journalistic standards of objective reporting. And of course there's always been people with agendas who wanted to bend reporting a certain way.
It still wasn't anywhere near as common for outlets to aspire to be Pravda or for individuals to aspire to read from an outlet that was.
For one, few in the Soviet Union trusted Pravda, whileoat people in the US trust the picture of the world that the newspapers present. So, while the US newspapers were overall far more correct than Pravda, they were nevertheless much more effective propaganda tools, when they did choose, intentionally or through deep-seated biases, to 'massage' the truth.
This is only partly true. One example that comes to mind, in the early 20th Century, Winston Churchill deliberately started a successful newspaper whose sole purpose was to disarm a general strike by workers who were underpaid. Not only did it suceed but Churchill bragged about it in Parliament to the opposition party after the strike had been defeated!
> In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
I think it's worth mentioning here how most media companies are totally or partly controlled by the acting CEO of FOX News, Rupert Murdoch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch). In the UK he controls almost all paper-based newspapers that the public read, in addition to most non-BBC channels. As a result, the papers have a staunch xenophobic, neoliberal attitude -- to the point of openly calling leading members of the opposition party in the UK "Maoist" (One newspaper in particular published 1500 words of fan fiction about the opposition party's socialist policies, mixed in with the ordinary news) and naming and shaming members of the UK high court for ruling that does not agree with the paper's stance. The papers have been known to publish outright lies about the European Union -- to the point the EU set up a website specifically to debunk the lies published in mainly Murdoch-controlled papers: https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/
This is part of the myth making that took hold after the New Deal, when the Establishment decided how things were going to be and made it so. If you have licensing powers over broadcast media you can use this to ensure that discussion stays inside the bounds of discourse you deem acceptable. Because these local media companies often had both broadcast and publishing arms they had a strong incentive not to piss off the regulators who could take away their broadcasting licenses.
This long period of manufactured consent lasted until the people who realised it was artificial retired or died and then technology allowed more diversity of opinion. Cable and talk radio allowed many, many more voices to be heard and expanded the Overton window, bringing the US back to normal politics where people really, really hate each other unless there’s an external enemy to hate more.
In the immediate post colonial period Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. In 1856 Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane on the floor of Congress. Andrew Jackson was held in much the same esteem by large swathes of the US population as Trump is now. In the 1960s there were over 3,000 domestic bombings and riots and demonstrations aplenty.
The media being hyper partisan is not new. What’s new is how obvious it is. It took decades for Walter Duranty’s lies about the Holodmor, the Ukrainian Holocaust to be exposed, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee still hasn’t revoked it. This for a cover up of millions of deaths in the pages of the NYT.
The prestige press is no more unbiased than Mother Jones or Breitbart.
https://deadline.com/2016/11/shocked-by-trump-new-york-times...
> For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
> It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
As a practical matter, I think the only thing a person can do is consciously seek out both sides of the story. Read a credible conservative daily (WSJ, Chicago Tribune) and a left-leaning Sunday paper (WaPo/NYT)/news magazine. Get both sides of the issue and see which you find more persuasive.
The fact that either the Washington Post or the New York Times is considered left-leaning is one of the problems in US media. They are both corporate rags pushing the neo-liberal plutocrat agenda. Try Jacobin or the London Review of Books as a somewhat left of center starters.
The above description of the NYT, however, is (a) not only a conservative's idea of what an opposing partisan newspaper would look like, it's almost a parody of such an idea (b) only sustainable through the lens of confirmation bias.
It's a huge difference. In one case you have a system meant to deliver information to inform, and which can be criticized if it fails to do so, which it often (or even mostly) failed at. Then there is these new media sources of 'information', which are not even trying, and nobody expects to try. One is a subversion of the standards which are explicitly expected, and the other is a system that has no standards whatsoever.
In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it.
Today many people get most of their news from sites like Breitbart or RawStory. Doing this is voluntarily signing up for Pravda like propaganda. Yes, we have a free society and you aren't restricted to a single source of news like Pravda, but if people intentionally and voluntarily limit themselves to a site that is manipulating stories in the same way as Pravda and for the same motivations, we just have two groups of oppositely propagandized people, and of course that will increase polarization. There is no expectation that these sites would uphold journalistic standards, be generally honest beyond when it is convenient, and their bias is considered a feature.