. . . but such was I, until the Carter era when I began to understand the situation.Do you mean to imply that you were raised distrustful of “objective journalism?"
When I was growing up, I never thought I was being misled or lied to. The Media was a trusted "Authority" and I, who had a great deal of respect for "Authority" imbued in me by my parents, unthinkingly swallowed it.
Why would they ever lie to me?
My first inkling that the government or media might not be fully truthful was during Nixon administration, and by the time I read Whitaker Chambers' "Witness" after several decades of watching the Left at work, the worm turned completely for me, and was solidified by reading M. Stanton Evans' book "Blacklisted by History".
Reading "Blacklisted by History" and seeing the tactics of the media today used to full effect against Joseph McCarthy simply scorched me.
The last time I watched the news at all was 9/11 and the aftermath leading up to Gulf War II. I stopped watching shortly after it started, and have never watched television news or read a newspaper or periodical like Time or Newsweek since then.
The bottom line is that I was one of those who thought the media was in business to tell us what was going on. I found out to my dismay that while that was true to a degree, the evil in what they do, forming and shaping the delivery of the news to not only bring in more viewers, but to promote the narrative they wanted, and it wasn't the narrative I believed to be true.
And I found out that all those people talking to me growing up as I went to school, where I trusted them to tell me truth, outright lied to me about something as important as Joseph McCarthy. The man is a hero, and should be celebrated as such...instead, due to the Media, government, and education system, he is vilified. People today have a lot of things I never had growing up, and an Internet that can provide and alternative view (that must still be taken with skepticism) is available to everyone. When I was a kid, to hear someone say that Cronkite was lying to the public would have been a real shock, but to find out what a sack of Leftist crap that man was is still jarring to me.
And I must say, it was extremely disillusioning to me, to realize what had been parroted to me by teachers, professors, government, and the media...never mind the entire left.
Bottom line: There is plenty of evidence, irrefutable evidence (Look at CNN's coverage of Trump) that the media is not a purveyor of truth, nor do they wish to be. I didn't have that when I was young, very few did.