Political Neutrality Is What Made American Newspapers Great

The Wall Street Journal ^ | July 10, 2020 | John Steele Gordon

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Many of America’s great newspapers have moved away from even the pretense of political neutrality. That tradition dates to 1835, when a Scottish immigrant named James Gordon Bennett founded the New York Herald.

. . . The Herald was something new under the journalistic sun. Newspapers had previously dealt either with narrow subjects, such as shipping or financial news, or were openly partisan, sometimes even subsidized by a political party.

. . . Bennett was responsible for an enormous was responsible for an enormous number of journalistic innovations of journalistic innovations. The Herald was the first general interest newspaper to include the weather report, provide sports coverage and include a daily stock table. It was the first to include an illustration in a story.

. . . By the 1850s Bennett's innovations had utterly transformed American journalism. The Herald had the largest circulation in the country.

. . . But much of the presses power to influence public opinion came from what was perhaps Bennett's greatest journalistic idea of all. He made the Herald politically neutral, printing opinion columns only on the editorial page. In his news pages he printed what he thought the readers will want to know, not what he wanted to tell them.

The idea spread quickly through the journalism industry, greatly enhancing its influence and prestige. Its abandonment may have the opposite effect. Its abandonment may have the opposite effect.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Journalism school grad here (I know, I know).

Sorry to say, there was NEVER a time where the news media wasn't biased. Bias = angle, and angle is what attracts readers or viewers to a story.

What happened was the news media figured out how to sell non-bias to the public. There was never any truth to it; it was simply marketing.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Remember

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate?

I started that thread in ’01, soon after 9/11/01.

I kept adding things to it for a long time - years - and switched to others over time.

My latest efforts are at the end of the Abolish the Wire Services thread.