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"You came home and turned on ABC, CBS or NBC news and the news was delivered in a non-partisan fact based method"

Getting news from only one partisan viewpoint is not the same thing as getting "non-partisan news".




You are splitting hairs. The point was there was no "tailored" view of the news. There where 3 and they had standards that they all followed. We do not have that anymore, we have infotainment, not the news.


Yes, it was absolutely tailored. The fact that there was no competition does not imply that it was not tailored.

Pick your favorite news story of that era. Dig deeper into it. Read the after-the-fact analyses and behind-the-scenes exposes. I guarantee you you will be shocked at the disparity between what was reported and what was most likely the truth. Yellow journalism never stopped, it just put on a suit and tie.

It is true that we get more highly-focused infotainment now, in a much more viciously competitive environment. It is not at all clear to me that the actual quality of the reporting has gone down all that much, though, on the grounds that it was nowhere near as high as the mythos says it was.


Really? What about tabloids? What about Rush Limbaugh? What about Bill O'Reilly? A shitload of people consumed primarily absurdly terrible news sources before they were on the Internet.


That's absolutely true but the horizontal peer-to-peer connection wasn't made it was mostly one-way.


The news was exceedingly highly tailored. It's just that the tailors agreed on their cuts.

Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jerry Mander, Niel Postman, and Robert W. McChesney all address this, as do many, many others.

If you'd like it from the horse's mouth, here's Edward R. Murrow's 1958 "Wires and Lights in a Box" speech:

http://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_li...




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