[Nateman]

...Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Thomas Jefferson.

The media telling lies is an old story. There are plenty of people out there who are quite happy with comfortable lies. It is the truth tellers who enrage them.

[poconopundit]

"...Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."

* * *

Good Jefferson quote, Nateman.  He hated the propaganda and lies of newspapers.  And yet, Jefferson also saw great value in newspapers:

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.  But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.


Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787) (as documented in Wikiquote.

Fifty years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his Essays:

Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons.  The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons.  They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.

With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations, beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go.

Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with.  Property will be protected.  Corn will not grow, unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it, unless the chances are a hundred to one, that he will cut and harvest it.

Under any forms, persons and property must and will have their just sway.  And the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, -- if not overtly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; with right, or by might.

Politics from Essays: Second Series (1844)