I agree with your post.After three decades of agonizing over those issues, I have qualified myself for kook status by coming up with a grand theory which explains the phenomena in question and implies a solution.
The trouble is not that the MSM is tendentious, the real trouble is that, memory of living man runneth not to the contrary, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe the MSM. It is by now a cultural problem.To attack that cultural problem it is necessary to identify its source. That source lies not in the founding era, but much later. In a discussion with a "media bias denier," the first question to ask is whether it was the newspaper sponsored by Alexander Hamilton or the bitterly opposed newspaper sponsored by Thomas Jefferson which was objective back then. The answer is that neither of them claimed to be objective; everyone would have laughed them to scorn if they had tried that. They were openly partisan, and everyone understood that it was up to the reader to decide which of them was in the right, about what. Pretty much like National Review and The Nation today.
So much for the theory that the First Amendment has something to do with "objectivity." Where did the theory of "journalistic objectivity" come from? "Newspapers," as they were already called back then, did not actually have a technological advantage over the general public at gathering news - in principle the owner of the local tavern probably heard everything that the printer heard, and therefore learned but little in the way of "news" from the "newspaper." So newspapers had a different function, which was more of an opinion expressing function to disseminate the opinions favored by the printers of the various papers. As well as commercial advertising, which does attract readers. The printing presses were relatively primitive, and the press runs were perforce small. And without a cornucopia of fresh news which would be news to the reader, there was little reason to print daily, and typically they were weeklies - and some had no deadline and just printed whenever the printer was good and ready.
Two Nineteenth Century developments changed that. First, in about 1830, the high speed press came into use. With a higher capacity available, the printer in a large market had a motive to appeal to a wider audience and therefore to not be politically specialized. But the transformational technology was the telegraph, and the organization which implemented the transformation was the Associated Press (founded 1848 as the "New York Associated Press." Suddenly AP members had "the wire." There was no longer any question of not having anything to say that readers hadn't already heard. The Associated Press was interested in incorporating all newspapers into it, and it was therefore aggressive about monopolizing the transmission of news by telegraph.
So here we had a novel situation - a single organization with nationwide influence over the public. Naturally, that raised eyebrows. But the AP had an answer to the questioning of their monopolistic status - "We have newspapers of all stripes of opinion in our association. We aren't partisan, we are objective."
So there you have it. The claim of journalistic objectivity is an artifact of the coordination of all the newspapers via the telegraph. Through an identifiable organization, the Associated Press.
There are two salient problems with the AP's argument. First, anyone who assumes that he is objective makes himself subjective by that very assumption. Secondly, the famous fractiousness of the AP's members is mooted by the transformation of the newspaper business implied in the AP newswire. The newspaper business hadn't actually been a true "news" business in the same way before the founding of the AP as it was after it. The AP didn't make the political opinions of editors coincide, but it did unite the newspapers around the proposition that news reporting was objective. Not because it is a fact - it certainly is not - but because acceptance of that belief by the public is central to the business model of the newspaper (and now also, of course, the broadcast journalist).
That was not the case before the advent of the Associated Press, but it has been for the past century and a half. And the applicability of O’Sullivan’s First Law - first to newspapers, then to the rest of society through the influence of journalism - follows from that.
O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.United around the importance of journalism, journalists promote the reporting of superficial bad news, whose importance typically resides only in the fact that the journalist knows it before the public does, and can be the first to tell it. And that is in the promotion of criticism over performance - exactly what Theodore Roosevelt"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena -warned against. The promotion of criticism over performance is the essence of leftism. The existing fee-for-service and private insurance model "isn't good enough" because it isn't perfect. And so we must institute control over the system by people who are utterly unqualified to provide the service, but who promote the idea of their own moral superiority over those who actually do. And who promote their own wisdom over the judgement of the actual patient as to the relative value of money and the physician's and the pharmacist's services. It is all a bunch of cheap talk.
BTTT
Thanks for the ping. BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH!