Great post. Thank you. When did the MSM get in bed with the commies? They are doggedly leftist today but I do not recall that as the case in the 50’s. Perhaps I am wrong, too young to really understand.
We rely so heavily on media and elitists to formulate historical opinion that very little survives from the Country Class. I sense a vigorous movement to change this in the forseeable future. It seems to be a product of the WWW with its broad based communications easily accesible to anyone.
Is it possible for a conservative political philosophy to build a stronghold in the electorate sufficient to overcome the current progressive influences? This must include a vigorous religious revival. When Christians begin taking warfare against Islam seriously there will be some hope of reestablishing the centrality of the US as a genuinely Christian nation.
There was a tension before WWII between top dog publishers and reporters who had an attachment to underdogs, but it wasn't really an ideological conflict.
In the 1950s college-educated reporters began to see themselves more as Walter Lippmann-type philosopher-commentators, but publishers and reporters kept them more or less in line.
By the 1970s this was harder and harder to do, as the old-style editors who worked their way up from the bottom were being replaced by college men.
The last big shift happened in the last twenty years. Children of the Sixties like Pinch Sulzberger made it to the very top and abandoned any pretense of evenhandedness.
Papers had also shifted heavily to life-style reporting to woo young urban readers. Newspaper staffers looked around the room and realized that most of the people there were gay (a slight exaggeration) and that had an effect on the reporting.