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I distinctly remember flipping through the TV during the national nightly news of ABC/CBS/NBC back in the early 1990's, and seeing essentially the same broadcast!

I have the same experience, in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's. I was a kid, and I noted the same segment on the same topic aired at the same time. I used to make a game of trying to get them to complete eachothers sentences.

Sometimes, I actually succeeded. It was that bad.

I was a kid, and I noted the same segment on the same topic aired at the same time.

Do you think it was what advertisers call "roadblocking"? Making sure everybody watching the news gets the same message at the same time (no "leakage")? Or more a case or "conscious parallelism"?

See my last re contrast of press and public political orientation. The public might not have known it, but the press pukes had to know McGovern was an old Prog Stalinist.

I have the same experience, in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's. I was a kid, and I noted the same segment on the same topic aired at the same time. I used to make a game of trying to get them to complete eachothers sentences. Sometimes, I actually succeeded. It was that bad.

I remember that too. It still happens. The same set of stories covered the same way by different networks. It gives me the impression that the various news producers tend to chat with each other, sharing choice lines and spin, before doing the scripts for their shows. We saw it happened with the JournoList online forum, where we found out how hundreds of media and news people got together to hash out what the spin should be on stories.

If anybody thinks that such consensus-building meetings weren't going on for decades before, in cocktail parties, news people getting together in bars, etc, etc, I have a bridge to sell you.

SF authors John Ringo and Tom Krattman at one point made note that, at the higher levels, the Left is not a conspiracy, it is a consensus.

The Left talks among themselves. They attach great importance to ideological purity, something all of us have probably noticed when we reveal a conservative viewpoint to a Lefty acquaintance, friend, or relative, and suddenly we suddenly turn into "unpersons". We have revealed our ideological impurity and are therefore unfit to associate with.

Think about the implications of that in the news field, where so much depends on reputation, on people recommending you for assignments and promotions, where people spend time talking about people. Those who do not "fit" the ideological conformity are driven out of the group, into the Outer Darkness. Look at what happened to Juan Williams. He was made an example of what happens when you stray. I'm sure it was a lesson that was not lost on the rest of the leftist MSM: strive to stay within the Consensus, or be cast out to starve.

... in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's...

You forgot to add"...when Disco reigned supreme...".