C T, I've pasted your excellent thesis here in this thread, where I have been cataloging similar points for some time. You might be interested in the whole thread.Early in our history as a nation, newspapers were very biased. Here in my home town of about 25,000 people, there were two newspapers with reasonable circulations. That was the typical situation in much of the United States. One paper was pro Democrat and the other was pro Republican. From the 1860s to the 1930s the two papers were very biased... openly and honestly so. Then they merged. But in the biased days both papers were like talk radio in that every effort was made to disclose the bias. The Democrat paper was proudly a Democrat paper and so was the Republican paper. Everyone knew where both papers stood on the issues of the day. They were biased but there was no attempt to deceive.
Each paper made the case for its party. When I was a young man just starting in radio, I went to the local library and read some of the issues of both papers. I read editions published before the turn of the 20th century. There was no pretense of objectivity in either. There was no lying to the public about what was in the papers. They presented their parties side. By reading both papers and doing your own analysis, one could get a very good idea of what was really going on at every level from local to national. Then with the advent of Radio and the changed economics of newspapers, the two merged. TV increased the rate of newspaper mergers all over the USA. Locally the surviving paper, as survivors did everywhere,s aid it was NOW going to be unbiased. But over the years it has become biased for the Democrat side, but it still claims to be unbiased. It was was for most of its history locally owned. Now it is part of a major chain. I no longer subscribe to it or read it. The circulation is getting lower as younger people do not subscribe.
Most of the survivor papers started down the slippery road to bias on the editorial page. The editorial page was said to be opinion. The papers openly claimed that they did not have to meet the standards of truth and fact on the Editorial page. They were fair because they had both left and right columnists. The editorial page was what was left of the individual papers. It had columnist supporting both parties in equal numbers. But over the years the columnists became almost exclusively leftist.
The original set up for the rest of the so called unbiased paper were NON bylined stories on all pages except the editorial page. It was understood that a story with out a byline did not contain anything except facts. On the other hand bylined stories (there were very few) were understood to be mostly factual but contained some of the opinions or analysis attributed to the reporter whose name was attached to the article. Over time bylined stories were used for all except wire stories. Newspapers began ti mix analysis and opinions in the main news content. A reader could no longer determine what was fact and what was fiction.. And non bylined stories from the wire became opinion pieces too. Opinion pieces is a cute name for news stories that contain statements that can not be proved to be true... That is, they contain lies.
The end result has been the change in newspaper reporting from fair and balanced reporting to unfair and unbalanced bylined reporting on all pages. And on OpEd pages the outright distortions and lies of a Maureen Dowd and many others are supported and promoted. The prime difference non in 2003 as opposed to 1983, is the side lied about and biased against has a way to fight back. There is the internet. Where the response to the lies and distortions of the leftist papers and broadcasters can be distributed. Talk radio is an other avenue to present the other side. Not much has changed in the print media except the media's ability to lie and get away with it no longer exists. It is a major shock to them.
The Fox News Channel on TV has changed broadcasting forever. They openly report the lies and bias of other papers and broadcasters. They are drawing a larger and larger audience every day. There was a time when the "paper of record" could lie on every page and there was no recourse. Then others in the press could quote those lies as truth and there was no recourse. Eventually the lies became to be known as the truth. There was a time when a former GM employee and an Eisenhower administration offical said, "What is good for the USA is good for General Motors" and have it distorted into "What is good for General Motors is good for America". There was nothing he could do. Not a single part of the media would point out the obvious change in meaning the reveral made.
That can't happen today. It is a major shock to the media. Today with Fox, talk radio and the internet there is recourse. What the so called "mainstream media" is doing today makes their problem worse. They say that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. The mainstream media lives in a glass house and they are throwing stones. They are quite surprised by the result. For the first time in their experience ordinary people have stones too. For the first time in 70 years the situation is self correcting.
The Times may not be a changin'...but the Times is dying a slow and painful death. The owner of the Times thinks he is writing a new chapter for his power structure...but his new chapter will turn out to be the Times's obituary.
50 posted on 05/30/2003 7:16 AM EDT by Common Tator
79 posted on 05/30/2003 3:21 PM EDT by Common Tator
Having copied your #50 here, I find that you followed it with #54, #73, #76, and #79 . . . and that responses to them were also interesting.Respectfully suggest that you initiate a stand-alone thread on the topic(s) you have discussed--and when you do, be kind enough to flag me.
On a substantive note, you point out that radio stations don't have to broadcast news--but that stations tend to lose ratings if they don't at least have a 3-minute top-of-the-hour news program (for a music-format station) and 5 minutes, for talk format. I treat the news almost as a commercial. Strong tendency to turn off the radio for 6 minutes at the top of the hour.
But then, I guess I'm pretty unusual in that respect--and there WAS a time when I regularly listened to news-radio! Obviously THAT was before I started formulating the analysis which animates this thread . . .
Broadcasting polical information on election day should be verboten. Consider the way the Soviet radio stations all used to switch to classical music when their dictator died. As long as the identity of the new dictator was not yet known, broadcasting politics could make enemies, possibly VERY powerful ones. We obviously have a system without that sort of fear element, but the principle is the same. The broadcast journalism of election day 2000 was a patent case of undue influence, and the broadcasting of exit poll results before the last polls are closed nationwide should lose you your FCC license. Just as I'm not allowed to talk politics in the polling place on election day . . .
The term "bias" relates to codes of journalistic ethics which presume that objectivity is possible and desirable. As your example illustrates, competitive papers with differing perspectives, honestly forwarded, are less deceptive than any so-called "objective" journalism.There is no need to use a perjorative when a paper has an identifiable perspective--in fact, all commercial, free, competitive mass-market journalism does have an identifiable (liberal) perspective. Consequently a journalism with an explicit "conservative perspective" is likely to consistently outperform any other kind of journalism as measured by how well that journalism stands up to subsequent historical scrutiny.