1010RD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media"."...Well done. Can you imagine what the narrative would be like had this happened before the Internet? If all we had were the Big 3 to get us information?"
Freeper conservatism_is_compassion has contributed some great commentary over the years on this subject, the bottom line being that there has NEVER been objective media, it is a myth.
The individual elements of the media would figure out what the message was, package the information into a format that would convey that message most effectively, and distribute it. It wasn't a monolithic enterprise where they were all faxing the talking points to each other, but when they all share pretty much the same world view, that didn't have to happen. The message would be uniform enough.
Actually, “the wire” obviates the need for any faxes of talking points. If you work for a newspaper which is a member of the Associated Press, you take on the mission of writing for the AP wire. And getting your reports shared over “the wire” and published by newspapers all over the country is a big deal for a journalist. To hit the big time, you need to please the journalistic community - and the journalistic community wants stories that bleed so that they can lede. They want "Man Bites Dog," not “Dog Bites Man,” stories.It doesn’t take a fax of “talking points” to do that. But that does have political implications. If traditionally the important and prestigious jobs were done by white men, it is “Man Bites Dog” if a black or a woman becomes the head of Hewlett-Packard. If half the crime is perpetrated by the 10% of Americans who descended from slaves, then it is “Dog Bites Man,” and not jazzy enough to emphasize in the paper, if another black - possibly, tho we can’t actually be certain at this point, Trayvon Martin - attacks someone of a different, or the same, race.“Man Bites Dog” stories are inherently interesting because they are inherently atypical of what usually happens. And even if you didn’t deliberately focus on the negative, sudden unexpected changes are typically negative - it is so much easier for a house to burn down than it is for a house to be built suddenly and unexpectedly. But the negative, and the Man Bites Dog, emphasis of journalism inherently tends to make news reports seem to constantly tell you that the world is in a mess and getting worse. And of course, “Things can’t get worse!” is an extreme radical statement. What follows from it is (as Shakespeare put it), “Desperate ills are by desperate measures cured, or not at all."
It is all very easy to see in that light. I always boil it down to the fact they aren’t in the business to inform the public, they are in the business of making money.
That, and the power trip that comes to them from feeling as if they were having an influence on events.
Thanks for the excellent post.