With all due respect, that sounds exactly like a fairy tale. And I don't mean only the "Once upon a time" part.In reality, journalism in the founding era was more like a modern local weekly rag than anything else. Most newspapers were weeklies, and some had no deadline at all and simply went to press when the printer was good and ready. And like the modern local weekly, the founding era newspaper printer took for granted that its readers would have heard the latest news by the time they ever got around to reading a week-old newspaper. Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing newspapers in which they waged their partisan battles against each other; I see that as the embryonic stage of political parties in America.
And then came the high speed printing press, and the telegraph and the Associated Press. The high speed printing press was hungry for content to fill its new bandwidth, and the telegraph was just the ticket for providing it. The Associated Press aggressively worked to attain and maintain a monopoly on the telegraphic transmission of commercial news. All very efficient. It was of course noticed at the time that the Associated Press was potentially a centralized propaganda operation, and questions were raised about it. But the AP defended itself by pointing out that its component newspapers were of all different sorts and persuasions, and asserted that it was "objective."
The reality is that journalism is a special interest, the business of persuading the public to pay attention to itself and its advertisers on the basis that journalism - with its "wire" - has information that the public does not yet know. But the reality is also that the information which fits that category is inherently superficial. The newswire tells you in lavish detail about the house that burned down yesterday, but it doesn't mention all the work contractors did on houses yesterday. Consequently after a few years of the papers telling you only that houses are burning down, you may wake up one morning and realize that an entire city has been built.
Journalism is an artificial reality in which journalists are heroes and the people who produce and distribute the food, fuel, security, and other goods and services you depend on are suspects or villains. In the real world Theodore Roosevelt is correct that
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore RooseveltIn the artificial reality of journalism, it is just the opposite. In JournalismWorld, people who second guess are heroes who should be in charge of everything. The planted axiom of JournalismWorld is socialism.In the real world the correct definition of subjective should be, "having a belief in one's own objectivity." There never was a golden age of objective journalism, only a golden age of propaganda success of the newswire monopoly which I like to call Big Journalism. If you read Ann Coulter's Treason, you will come to understand that the term "McCarthyism" is simply a smear of a patriot (albeit not necessarily a more perfect person than, say, yourself).
Dan Rather's behavior during and since the "Killian memo" flap is inexplicable unless you understand that it is simply the standard operating procedure of "objective" journalism. The only reason it didn't work - the only reason Rather is not Cronkite, and John Kerry is not POTUS - is that the Internet and Talk Radio have broken down the walls between you and me and the sources of news. Cronkite could count on the support of the rest of Big Journalism to prevent a critical mass of knowledge of the truth from developing in the general public which would have made a wide public aware of journalism's tendentiousness. Rather counted on the same thing, and his fellow gatekeepers at NBC, ABC, The New York Times, et al did not let him down but followed right where he was leading. The only trouble was, gatekeepers are irrelevant when the walls are down. Some people - a lot of people, actually - are still restricting themselves to the gates, out of habit. But others have the sense to realize what the gatekeepers have been up to, and go through the hole in the wall instead.
Very profound and timely.