That's something that has literally never been the case. Skepticism exists on a sliding scale, and children are taught in high school how to spot a biased headline, a poor use of a statistic, and so on.
When it comes to the public's attitude toward the press, it's not credulousness versus skepticism that exists, it's healthy skepticism versus cynicism.
To wit, I don’t characterize as “healthy skepticism” the propagation of the outright lie, in this very thread, that the NYT is not a business.
You know, it's before my time, but when Cronkite suggested in 1968 that the United States withdraw from Vietnam, I believe what he said was taken seriously. I do not believe it resulted in the country unifying behind the peace movement and immediately withdrawing from Vietnam, which is the sort thing that would happen if "most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them."
> The mainstream media is terrified by the gradual erosion of this power and is desperately trying to convince everyone that it’s better for society at large for them to hold that level of implicit public trust. This is even more true for newspapers, which have always considered themselves of higher status than television anyway.
The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously. Those monsters.
It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
> The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously.
I take the work of the media seriously enough to be critical towards it rather than abiding by lies about how media corporations aren't actually corporations.
That's actually not something I argued, although I understand there's a subthread or something about it.
> More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
I'm not sure how much I actually agree or disagree because you're being so blatantly hyperbolic ("unquestioning acceptance," etc.) about things that frankly aren't key to what I believe is the interesting point.
Decentralization and news apart from the mainstream media seems like it should be be a great benefit. Like them or not, it was never a good situation that GE owned NBC, one family owned the Washington Post, or whatever. The trouble is, one thing that has not happened has been greater empowerment of small newspapers and local journalists who are best positioned to serve their communities. They're simply being driven out of business by large companies.
On the other hand, "mainstream media" is often just code for non-conservative media, whatever exists outside of Fox, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and assorted AM radio garbage. If that's how you look at things, the "mainstream media" is definitely losing some market share and mindshare.
> It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
Johnson made a comment to the effect that he'd just lost the war, but when it came to war fighting, Johnson was honestly quite an idiot. The ultimate outcome of the war had many more years to be determined and a lot of other people had their say, including, you know, the enemy.
Does the NYT deliver higher quality reporting than Alex Jones? Yes, of course they do, but they are neither perfect nor omniscient nor unbiased nor purely virtuous in their motivations.
Let’s turn this around, shall we? When the public implicitly trusts media corporations that are operated for profit and owned by billionaires, they are doomed to authoritarian rule, most likely by leaders backed by the business elite that owns and operates these media corporations in the first place.
Implicit trust of any institution is a shortcut to authoritarian rule. And every authoritarian justifies themselves by accusing others of being a greater threat. The only proper attitude for a free people is to distrust and resist any institution that holds or seeks power, and that includes the mainstream press.