> Newspapers were at least, historically at least in the 20th century, were expected to inform and keep a separation between opinion and news. They clearly had

> Newspapers were at least, historically at least in the 20th century, were expected to inform and keep a separation between opinion and news. They clearly had a political slant, but they couldn't just ignore facts that they found inconvenient, or only mention them in hit pieces meant to discredit them. Exceptions to this, like Yellow Journalism and Hearst's use of his papers for personal and political ends were at least considered failures of journalism in hindsight. This is only partly true. One example that comes to mind, in the early 20th Century, Winston Churchill deliberately started a successful newspaper whose sole purpose was to disarm a general strike by workers who were underpaid. Not only did it suceed but Churchill bragged about it in Parliament to the opposition party after the strike had been defeated! > In the Soviet Union they kept a tight control on the media, and Pravda was controlled by the ruling party to amplify it's message as a tool of propaganda. It would ignore inconvenient facts and stories based on their propaganda value, or if something inconvenient was too well known to ignore it would mention it only to discredit it. I think it's worth mentioning here how most media companies are totally or partly controlled by the acting CEO of FOX News, Rupert Murdoch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch). In the UK he controls almost all paper-based newspapers that the public read, in addition to most non-BBC channels. As a result, the papers have a staunch xenophobic, neoliberal attitude -- to the point of openly calling leading members of the opposition party in the UK "Maoist" (One newspaper in particular published 1500 words of fan fiction about the opposition party's socialist policies, mixed in with the ordinary news) and naming and shaming members of the UK high court for ruling that does not agree with the paper's stance. The papers have been known to publish outright lies about the European Union -- to the point the EU set up a website specifically to debunk the lies published in mainly Murdoch-controlled papers: https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/ https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/