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No, they didn't. That's my point. One of the most famous scenes in US TV News history was when Walter Kronkite, America's news daddy, finally had enough regardi

No, they didn't. That's my point. One of the most famous scenes in US TV News history was when Walter Kronkite, America's news daddy, finally had enough regarding the bullshit peddled by national television networks regarding the Vietnam war. It was NEVER unbiased. People love to believe that the news USED to be unbiased because the news produced at the time reconciles with their memory of the events they want to believe to be true. But we keep clippings of literally everything, and the one thing that is crystal clear is that what is being reported has always been focused through the lens of the mind of the person doing that reporting. Go look at this link, which is a collection at Kent State University of articles written about the massacre at the school from the time of the shootings: https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archives/kent-state-shootings-selected-articles https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archive... Tell me how all of these articles are simultaneously unbiased from the headlines.

therealjumbo 5y ago
Biased and manipulated news is a spectrum like security. You can find instances of anything in the past of you look hard enough. We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s. Additionally, pointing out that Facebook lacks any fundamental principles and is just a reed in the wind is a great observation.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s. No, we are not.
- lazide 5y ago
  Not even close - look up COINTELPRO and how many of the letters that were sent by the discoverers of that information ACTUALLY made it, let alone how few that did make it actually got published. Hint : very few. The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority, and there is always the element of ‘the truth we choose to believe’ (or are being told to believe) being published over harder reality. The west tends to be more transparent than most, and more honest than most, but everyone is very far from, and has always been very far from, any sort of unbiased view.
  - therealjumbo 5y ago
    COINTELPRO was a thing, yes, but now almost all news is manipulated. Then stuff related to those stories was, big difference. >The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority, Yes, that's what I mean, to what degree? That degree is much greater now than it was in the past, except the one doing the manipulation isn't necessarily the government.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Do you have any first hand experience as a journalist in the 60’s to base that on? Do you have any links to facts that might support those assertions? If not, I rest my case?
      - therealjumbo 5y ago
        The incentive to lie and manipulate is greater now than in the past. New information technology (nowadays social media....) increases the benefits of lying, and decreases the costs of doing so effectively. So I would expect there to be more today than 40 years ago.
kmeisthax 5y ago
News in that era was "unbiased" mostly because the US government had a soft censorship regime in the form of the FCC and corporate ownership of TV spectrum. Walter Kronkite calling out the government on Vietnam was the exception rather than the norm. What people are remembering isn't "objectivity", it's one particular bias[0] everyone was required to have in journalism - i.e. the illusion of objectivity. Today's "biased" news is just regression to the American mean. When people got their news from newspapers, almost a century ago, you had similar levels of editorialization, bias, closed-mindedness, clickbait, misinformation, and so on. The "unbiased" era was largely a product of technical limitations that went away with cable, and later the Internet. [0] Or, more specifically, what Noam Chomsky called the "five filters". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

therealjumbo 5y ago

Biased and manipulated news is a spectrum like security. You can find instances of anything in the past of you look hard enough. We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s. Additionally, pointing out that Facebook lacks any fundamental principles and is just a reed in the wind is a great observation.

pessimizer 5y ago
> We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s. No, we are not.
lazide 5y ago
Not even close - look up COINTELPRO and how many of the letters that were sent by the discoverers of that information ACTUALLY made it, let alone how few that did make it actually got published. Hint : very few. The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority, and there is always the element of ‘the truth we choose to believe’ (or are being told to believe) being published over harder reality. The west tends to be more transparent than most, and more honest than most, but everyone is very far from, and has always been very far from, any sort of unbiased view.
- therealjumbo 5y ago
  COINTELPRO was a thing, yes, but now almost all news is manipulated. Then stuff related to those stories was, big difference. >The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority, Yes, that's what I mean, to what degree? That degree is much greater now than it was in the past, except the one doing the manipulation isn't necessarily the government.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Do you have any first hand experience as a journalist in the 60’s to base that on? Do you have any links to facts that might support those assertions? If not, I rest my case?
    - therealjumbo 5y ago
      The incentive to lie and manipulate is greater now than in the past. New information technology (nowadays social media....) increases the benefits of lying, and decreases the costs of doing so effectively. So I would expect there to be more today than 40 years ago.

kmeisthax 5y ago

News in that era was "unbiased" mostly because the US government had a soft censorship regime in the form of the FCC and corporate ownership of TV spectrum. Walter Kronkite calling out the government on Vietnam was the exception rather than the norm. What people are remembering isn't "objectivity", it's one particular bias[0] everyone was required to have in journalism - i.e. the illusion of objectivity. Today's "biased" news is just regression to the American mean. When people got their news from newspapers, almost a century ago, you had similar levels of editorialization, bias, closed-mindedness, clickbait, misinformation, and so on. The "unbiased" era was largely a product of technical limitations that went away with cable, and later the Internet. [0] Or, more specifically, what Noam Chomsky called the "five filters". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model