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Some 100 years ago, newspapers always used to have a point of view, unabashedly. If you look at American newspapers from the time of the American revolution on forward (they are available at the New-York Historical Society, among other places), you will be struck by their loyalty to political parties and movements throughout the 19th century.

The age of so-called "yellow journalism" came to a head as William Randolph Hearst beat the drum for the Spanish American War. After that, there was a self-conscious professionalization of journalism, where the model became an attempt to become neutral and objective.

This was hard enough to accomplish when America was considered a melting pot with identifiable American values (from the 1910s through the mid-1960s). Now that our self image is that of a multicultural nation (a "gorgeous mosaic, as Mayor David Dinkins of New York used to say) where the pressure seems to be not to conform rather to conform, it is difficult to find a common frame of reference and the ideal of journalistic neutrality seems impossible.

I think that most critical readers of the New York Times will tell you, for example, that that newspaper is orders of magnitude more biased now than it ever was during the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, etc. Until recently, its biases showed up more as lapses, such as Walter Duranty's fraudulent reporting on the Soviet economy in the 1930s and the paper's editorial decisions to ignore the Holocaust during World War II. Today, the entire paper is cut on the bias.

I don't think that Marxism had anything to do with it.

Regarding the Pew survey, if people say that they prefer getting their news from sources that don't have a political point of view, I think that they are nostalgic for an earlier America and haven't yet adapted to the internet age of weblogs and Free Republic, where newspaper articles are posted (or excerpted) and then "Fisked", or pulled apart, with their biases exposed and analyzed. We are the future!!

Interesting article by Okrent at the Times today, denigrating the idea of the "newspaper of record. Consider these paragraphs (fair use excerpt, registration required: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/weekinreview/25bott.html ):

In a heterogeneous world, whose record is one newspaper even in the position to preserve? And what group of individuals, no matter how talented or dedicated, would dare arrogate to itself so godlike a role? If you rely on The Times as your only source of news, you are buying into the conceptions, attitudes and interests of the people who put it out every day. It cannot be definitive, and asking it to be is a disservice to both the staff and the readers. I mean no disrespect to The Times, but what discriminating citizen can really afford to rely on only one source of news? And can't all discriminating readers contextualize what their newspapers (or television stations or radio hosts or Web logs) tell them?

There seem to be more and more articles in the mainstreem media (like the ABC News weblog; I've lost the link to the article) admitting to media bias. When they think about it, they will come to appreciate sites like FR for relieving them of the burden of trying/pretending to be objective.