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In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why
by User23 5y ago
In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoAmerican journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism