This is not news, this is not a confession, this is not a sparkling revelation.
Swaying public opinion has always been the job of the news people long, long before there the USA was ever thought of.
Why is this so hard for people to believe until now?
Swaying public opinion has always been the job of the news people long, long before there the USA was ever thought of.
Considering that there were no “News people” until a little before the U.S. was created, that is a bit of a stretch.
Literacy of more than 50% of adults only hit Europe by about 1700. There were not a lot of newspapers.
You can make a good argument that the United States was the first country formed with over half its population literate.
There are claims that Jews enjoyed widespread literacy as early as 600 BCE.