Have you ever actually read examples of newspapers and news reporting from the earlier parts of the 20th century? The dishonest, mendacious bias in favor of any media source's ideological preference was extreme to a degree that even today isn't readily visible. Certain media empires were absolutely ruled by their owners and even major papers like the New York Times were often loaded in slant towards certain ideological narratives. Just to name one example: Read about Walter Duranty. Things were even more vicious in the 19th century.... I have no idea where this notion of once fair, objective news sources comes from but it's certainly not rooted in the practical reality (referring in all of this to U.S media and politics, regarding other countries things get more ambiguous and complciated probably).
Whereas Walter Duranty was a big deal in the 20s & 30s, in much more fragmented & volatile times. Although how much their fragmentation resembles ours I don't know. They had many far-out newspapers but still only a few radio shows, and perhaps a larger role for shared institutions like churches & public schools?
Sure, but that reality was a top-down creation. How much airtime did dissidents get? Socialists? Women? Marginalised people? And I don't mean reporting on them, but stories by them.
But I'd like to highlight other forces. One was technological, 3 TV channels or whatever was all they could do, and this implied that there was going to be a pretty high degree of conformity. You couldn't broadcast weird Italian movies because only a few percent were interested. The 4 big car companies who bought the ads which paid the bills really didn't want to be associated with anything partisan, they all needed to sell to everyone.
Another was historical / emotional. The nation had just emerged from this gigantic world war, and it was a spectacular victory, which gave enormous prestige to the huge centralized machines built to fight it. They built a lot of similar machines back home, big corporations with a commander-in-chief who wasn't a self-made robber barron, he was promoted up the ranks. Big unions, and big regulation.
This experience also squashed a lot of earlier differences. You say "Women? Marginalised people?" but this seems like a modern take, I think they would have said "Irish? Polish? Jewish?". These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one, I mean, a Catholic could be elected president, that was a big deal.
But all of these are gone now. So perhaps 100 years ago is a better guide than 50 years ago.
> These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one
Shared by white people, for the most part.
I'm not sure what you mean in your penultimate paragraph. "identities and divisions eroding" is only partly true, surely. You could certainly argue the opposite is true - see the women's lib and civil rights movements for examples of people fighting back against conformity.
Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.
I wish more people thought this way. We think we're so smart!
In off to bed, but thank you for the reply, I understand more what you meant now.
No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.
When other outlets shill for the RNC, that isn't the same as having "political tendencies."
In the past, these maneuvers would have been considered conflicts of interest and a violation journalistic ethics. Today, we don't have many practicing journalists. We have "here's a lefty and here's a righty, let's watch 'em argue on screen" passed off as news.
The moment Obama was elected those counts stopped.
We all want to believe that nice guy on TV. Is honest and neutral.
This is almost never the case.
Notice how in the first few months of the pandemic the daily stats were front page? Like, every day and multiple times per day. Now we just occasionally get the "USA breaks single day record" second or third level heading with no specific numbers.
But, I promise you in 4 years people will be remember this as "Remember when the media was reporting the pandemic deaths non-stop when Trump was in office but it _suddenly_ stopped when Biden was in office?"
Just like people seem to remember when "Mitch Mcconnell" overrode Obama's veto. The veto both houses and both parties overrode. 97-1 in the senate.
Couple that with people remembering things how they want, or believing what they want to hear, and Bob is you uncle.
The thing about "what has happened" is that it actually leaves a lot of room for bad faith reporting. You can never include everything. What isn't reported is just as important as what is, whether it's whole stories, certain viewpoints, context, anything.
What criticisms did mainstream news outlets level at George W. Bush that you felt were attacks? At what point in the lead-up to lies-based invasion do you feel it's ok to say "Bush and Cheney just might be lying here, folks."?
I don't think there can be economically, without regulating (supply limiting) news media.
They were debatably on par with politicians. But increase the number of news outlets, and the importance of any anchor decreases.
Consequently, their ability to ask hard questions without losing access to their sources decreases.
Rupert Murdock called on Republican political strategist Roger Ailes in 1996 when creating Fox News. Ailes launched and then ran Fox News as its CEO for decades.
This is the same guy who worked as a media adviser to basically every successful Republican presidential campaign.. Nixon, Reagan, Bush.. and even Trump (before Ailes died, and after a sexual misconduct scandal finally got him canned at Fox).
Ailes was so influential as a strategist that he was even credited for one of Bush senior's wins back in the day. And he built and reigned at Fox News for 20+ years.
So we had a major republican political operator put in charge of a news network by a global political operator (Murdoch) who only got US citizenship as it was a requirement for US television station ownership. And who had a history of using his media empire to shape political narrative for influence.
The frustrating thing is that Murdoch's influence shaping has always been more about accumulating power than towards spreading specific ideology. In Australia in the 60s and 70s, he backed the faction pushing for universal free health care, free college education for all Australians, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources.
Sounds very un-Fox-like, doesn't it? It was the in-road to political power, the faction that would get him the most influence by supporting. There was a write-up some years ago in the UK that delves a bit more into his history (as he has also been peddling influence in the UK for decades as well):
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a-man-of-selfish-lo...
But tying this back to Fox News.. he came to the US, built a TV network and used that foundation to build a news station. This was a push to become a major political controller by building and embedding Fox News as the media arm of the Republican party.
They used this to condition their base. The lead-up to today is decades of people turning on FOX to watch Geraldo, sticking around for the news, then wandering off with talking points stuffed into their heads by influencers with an agenda who were presenting the news.
And the strategy was so successful that it generates mimics to the model. The most evil I see is Sinclair Media buying up local news stations and putting the same talking points into the mouths of local pundits across the nation. There's a creepy video compilation that highlights the tactics of this influence machinery by showing clips from each of these local news outlets with different talking heads each repeating the same points.
Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence. It is exceedingly difficult to find information presented without some attempt to mislead.
The short version: There are no more Walter Cronkites or Edward R. Murrows the nation trusts to present the news without filter or spin.
That coupled with the algorithmically enhanced echo-chambers of social media you mention, multiplied by two decades of teaching outrage and protest instead of critical thinking and history, gets you this.