6 ms·

As far as I can tell, this idea of newspeople as morally pure monk-like defenders of the truth is isolated to a handful of decades in post-war America, mostly c

As far as I can tell, this idea of newspeople as morally pure monk-like defenders of the truth is isolated to a handful of decades in post-war America, mostly confined to a few personalities and outlets, and was far from universally-held even then (lots of people blamed, or still blame, the media for our losing the Vietnam War, for instance—Agnew and others were openly attacking them as corrupt and biased for those and related reasons, in the 70s). Their traditional depiction in fiction is, and long has been, as about one step up from pimps, con-men, and used car salesmen, as far as ethics and trustworthiness are concerned. I doubt some Golden Age of news objectivity ever existed, really, though the perception of it may have, among some set of people, for a time—hell, you can find people today who think Fox News does great journalism, so the perception of that clearly doesn't require it to be a fact. I'm fairly sure it's exactly the same kind of longing for a past that never existed that one can see all around.

AlbertCory 4y ago
> I doubt some Golden Age of news objectivity ever existed Maybe that's because you haven't read any of it? I mean, it's hard to find on the Web these days. And easy to find counter-examples even from that period. Just like it's easy to find some Victorian-era pornography and leap to the conclusion that everything then was just like now.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've read good reporting, sure. Good reporting isn't mythical. People worried about modern journalism's lack of objectivity or reliability just strike me as folks learning for the first time what journalism's usually like, is all, and being surprised and thinking that it's a new development because they just learned about it. I'm not claiming there's no such thing as good reporting.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  when was this Golden Age of News Objectivity, then? because from where I'm standing, it sure seems like it was more of a Golden Age of There Only Being A Few Accessible Sources of News, Most If Not All of Whom Were On The Same Page When It Comes To Major Stories, i.e., The Time Before Smartphones. case in point: the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. the entire United States media apparatus united to gaslight the populace into consenting to an foreign-soil military invasion on incredibly shaky grounds, that were later proven to be completely false. they even gaslit us into disapproving of our own allies choosing to not join us in the invasion—remember "freedom fries"? yet the only lesson the majority of the public seemed to learn from this is "George W. Bush is a bad guy", which is also true, but misses the point entirely—plus, in recent years, now that's not even entirely true, because look, he's bffs with Michele Obama, see, he's not that bad of a guy, right? the cycle continues unabated.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I usually see it associated with Cronkite's era on TV, about '60-'80. Such strong association with him is part of why it smells like nostalgia and selective memory, to me. And, again, you'd find plenty of people who think he was biased and doing slanted anti-American reporting in the second of those two decades. I would hope most people wouldn't regard the '90s and '00s as part of any kind of even-imaginary golden era of reporting. I've got some half-formed notion of this sentiment coming from a kind of hang-over from WWII propaganda and tight media control involving much more direct action by US government through media, but haven't exactly researched it and wouldn't stand behind that firmly. Just a hunch. Broadly, my suspicion, if that does indeed have anything to do with it, is that the fallout of that propaganda effort coupled with a crushing victory for the US resulted in a durable credibility for sufficiently official-looking news personalities, that took some time (and the loss of a war in Vietnam, and a huge shift in politics that really took shape starting with Nixon's campaigns) to erode, but was never especially real, as in, wasn't strongly related to some actual difference in circumstances and quality in news media in postwar America compared with the first half of the century.
    - adamrezich 4y ago
      I completely agree with your assessment, but my point was, in the 90s and 00s, we were still in the bubble. we still thought of our news media as being completely trustworthy. even the post-9/11 invasions being predicated upon news media consent manufacturing wasn't enough to shake us out of it—nobody blamed the news media, Bush (and some of his cabinet) "took the fall" for the whole thing. we can look back on it now and obviously it's almost hilarious how terribly complicit the news media was in manufacturing consent for war crimes, but at the time, we didn't think about it that way. nobody thought about it that way. it was The News, which we had trust in, because we (90s millennials) had grown up watching it, and so had our parents. the popular idea that the news is largely full of shit did not come about until Trump popularized the term "fake news", and then they threw it back at him, and so on and so forth. (hopefully it's uncontroversial to state that Trump would not have been likely to be elected if people didn't have smartphones with which to consume sources of news other than that of the mainstream legacy news media.) before that, people still generally trusted the news media, even while still actively having boots on the ground in the Middle East due to the previous round of gaslighting. both Obama administrations, as far as I can recall at least, were still in an era where most people more or less trusted the media. sure, maybe you weren't a fan of FOX News or MSNBC or whatever, but you still felt like, no matter what your political affiliation was, you could tune into a cable TV news program and more or less get the truth about what was going on in the world. I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Or maybe it's because that wasn't real. Major mass media sifted through a few government- and corporate-ad-constrained bottlenecks during what people call "the golden age." It was the golden age of censorship. People get upset about censorship much more easily now because they got used to the wild west mentality ushered in by the Internet and relaxation of the fairness doctrine. So returning to government- and corporate-ad-based censorship feels constraining.

AlbertCory 4y ago

> I doubt some Golden Age of news objectivity ever existed Maybe that's because you haven't read any of it? I mean, it's hard to find on the Web these days. And easy to find counter-examples even from that period. Just like it's easy to find some Victorian-era pornography and leap to the conclusion that everything then was just like now.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've read good reporting, sure. Good reporting isn't mythical. People worried about modern journalism's lack of objectivity or reliability just strike me as folks learning for the first time what journalism's usually like, is all, and being surprised and thinking that it's a new development because they just learned about it. I'm not claiming there's no such thing as good reporting.
adamrezich 4y ago
when was this Golden Age of News Objectivity, then? because from where I'm standing, it sure seems like it was more of a Golden Age of There Only Being A Few Accessible Sources of News, Most If Not All of Whom Were On The Same Page When It Comes To Major Stories, i.e., The Time Before Smartphones. case in point: the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. the entire United States media apparatus united to gaslight the populace into consenting to an foreign-soil military invasion on incredibly shaky grounds, that were later proven to be completely false. they even gaslit us into disapproving of our own allies choosing to not join us in the invasion—remember "freedom fries"? yet the only lesson the majority of the public seemed to learn from this is "George W. Bush is a bad guy", which is also true, but misses the point entirely—plus, in recent years, now that's not even entirely true, because look, he's bffs with Michele Obama, see, he's not that bad of a guy, right? the cycle continues unabated.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I usually see it associated with Cronkite's era on TV, about '60-'80. Such strong association with him is part of why it smells like nostalgia and selective memory, to me. And, again, you'd find plenty of people who think he was biased and doing slanted anti-American reporting in the second of those two decades. I would hope most people wouldn't regard the '90s and '00s as part of any kind of even-imaginary golden era of reporting. I've got some half-formed notion of this sentiment coming from a kind of hang-over from WWII propaganda and tight media control involving much more direct action by US government through media, but haven't exactly researched it and wouldn't stand behind that firmly. Just a hunch. Broadly, my suspicion, if that does indeed have anything to do with it, is that the fallout of that propaganda effort coupled with a crushing victory for the US resulted in a durable credibility for sufficiently official-looking news personalities, that took some time (and the loss of a war in Vietnam, and a huge shift in politics that really took shape starting with Nixon's campaigns) to erode, but was never especially real, as in, wasn't strongly related to some actual difference in circumstances and quality in news media in postwar America compared with the first half of the century.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    I completely agree with your assessment, but my point was, in the 90s and 00s, we were still in the bubble. we still thought of our news media as being completely trustworthy. even the post-9/11 invasions being predicated upon news media consent manufacturing wasn't enough to shake us out of it—nobody blamed the news media, Bush (and some of his cabinet) "took the fall" for the whole thing. we can look back on it now and obviously it's almost hilarious how terribly complicit the news media was in manufacturing consent for war crimes, but at the time, we didn't think about it that way. nobody thought about it that way. it was The News, which we had trust in, because we (90s millennials) had grown up watching it, and so had our parents. the popular idea that the news is largely full of shit did not come about until Trump popularized the term "fake news", and then they threw it back at him, and so on and so forth. (hopefully it's uncontroversial to state that Trump would not have been likely to be elected if people didn't have smartphones with which to consume sources of news other than that of the mainstream legacy news media.) before that, people still generally trusted the news media, even while still actively having boots on the ground in the Middle East due to the previous round of gaslighting. both Obama administrations, as far as I can recall at least, were still in an era where most people more or less trusted the media. sure, maybe you weren't a fan of FOX News or MSNBC or whatever, but you still felt like, no matter what your political affiliation was, you could tune into a cable TV news program and more or less get the truth about what was going on in the world. I had a one-semester Current World Affairs class in high school in 2007, and we spent most of it watching cable news, reading newspapers, and talking about it, without any of the default critical position you'd (hopefully??) expect today.
drewcoo 4y ago
Or maybe it's because that wasn't real. Major mass media sifted through a few government- and corporate-ad-constrained bottlenecks during what people call "the golden age." It was the golden age of censorship. People get upset about censorship much more easily now because they got used to the wild west mentality ushered in by the Internet and relaxation of the fairness doctrine. So returning to government- and corporate-ad-based censorship feels constraining.