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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 mem

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.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think some of that's the difference between high school and college. Even today's more even-tempered history and civics classes in high school really downplay problems in our history and our systems, overall, including problems with the media, but as soon as you hit your first serious media studies textbook or course or just slip into a subculture that's into that sort of thing so assumes some familiarity with it as a background (politics nerds, certain flavors of history buffs, basically any leftist movement) you get a rather different idea of how things are going, and have gone, and realize that contemporary media criticism is part of a long tradition that's advanced similar complaints and made similar observations about structural problems with the media (access-related conflict of interest, slant via selection of what's "newsworthy", bias toward reporting violence or the otherwise shocking, ownership- or advertiser-related conflict of interest, susceptibility to lazily repeating propaganda from official sources, et c.) for pretty much the entire time this has been a field of study. High school history class might cover e.g. yellow journalism as some temporary historical phenomenon, but won't usually dig into, say, the fact that the idea of "unbiased reporting" or "just presenting the facts" or "we report, you decide" are all kinda questionable to begin with—which facts? Which stories? When and how ought media provide context for a story, or leave it out? I can lie with facts all day long, it's not even hard. Half the lies on the actually-kinda-news segments of Fox News (yeah, sorry, still picking on them because they're an easy target) are just them reporting things without the context that makes it plainly a non-story—they're "just" reporting the facts, but it's slanted as hell, and they're deliberately implying things that aren't true by leaving out the context you need to tell that they're wrong. Take it another direction, and you can lie by providing the wrong context (not a lie in the sense of an outright falsehood! Just selective presentation). The history of media as largely explicitly partisan for much of the country's history will likely also barely be covered, and will almost certainly not be connected to the current state of media. ... but not everyone ends up seeing that expanded view. Maybe what I'm not accounting for is a recent popularization of a kind of shitty, partial, divorced-from-scholarship-and-history version of that POV, through the mechanisms and circumstances you mention, the holding of which might convince someone that this is a recent development, for lack of the rest of that context. "Now the media lies sometimes! That's new!" I don't think the media landscape's wholly unchanging, and do thing some things like the loss of the fairness doctrine and our allowing some pretty incredible levels of media ownership consolidation has had some ill effects (though the death of the fairness doctrine would have little effect on the Internet, anyway, and the main outcome of losing it was the rise of partisan commentary and opinion without balancing counter-point, not more-slanted news—basically, it allowed the current much-maligned "media bubble" effect to get a running start way back in the 1980s, well before the rise of the Web as something normal people used, but that was mostly accomplished through commentary shows, not reporting). I'm just skeptical that we were ever a ton better off in terms of, specifically, news media honesty and integrity than we are now. > 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. Schools have to be damned careful how they treat current events. Parents get pissed off in a hurry over some really, really dumb shit, like "acknowledging basic things about reality that definitely shouldn't be controversial" sorts of shit, and if there's one thing schools hate dealing with, it's pissed-off parents. Start analyzing slant in media reporting in high school, as a teacher, and you're courting a reprimand even if you do your job perfectly and entirely objectively (somehow). "The closest thing to a widely-agreed-upon-to-be-neutral source we can find, presented with minimal commentary" is often the best they can realistically manage, and even that will get angry phone calls from time to time.

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.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I think some of that's the difference between high school and college. Even today's more even-tempered history and civics classes in high school really downplay problems in our history and our systems, overall, including problems with the media, but as soon as you hit your first serious media studies textbook or course or just slip into a subculture that's into that sort of thing so assumes some familiarity with it as a background (politics nerds, certain flavors of history buffs, basically any leftist movement) you get a rather different idea of how things are going, and have gone, and realize that contemporary media criticism is part of a long tradition that's advanced similar complaints and made similar observations about structural problems with the media (access-related conflict of interest, slant via selection of what's "newsworthy", bias toward reporting violence or the otherwise shocking, ownership- or advertiser-related conflict of interest, susceptibility to lazily repeating propaganda from official sources, et c.) for pretty much the entire time this has been a field of study. High school history class might cover e.g. yellow journalism as some temporary historical phenomenon, but won't usually dig into, say, the fact that the idea of "unbiased reporting" or "just presenting the facts" or "we report, you decide" are all kinda questionable to begin with—which facts? Which stories? When and how ought media provide context for a story, or leave it out? I can lie with facts all day long, it's not even hard. Half the lies on the actually-kinda-news segments of Fox News (yeah, sorry, still picking on them because they're an easy target) are just them reporting things without the context that makes it plainly a non-story—they're "just" reporting the facts, but it's slanted as hell, and they're deliberately implying things that aren't true by leaving out the context you need to tell that they're wrong. Take it another direction, and you can lie by providing the wrong context (not a lie in the sense of an outright falsehood! Just selective presentation). The history of media as largely explicitly partisan for much of the country's history will likely also barely be covered, and will almost certainly not be connected to the current state of media. ... but not everyone ends up seeing that expanded view. Maybe what I'm not accounting for is a recent popularization of a kind of shitty, partial, divorced-from-scholarship-and-history version of that POV, through the mechanisms and circumstances you mention, the holding of which might convince someone that this is a recent development, for lack of the rest of that context. "Now the media lies sometimes! That's new!" I don't think the media landscape's wholly unchanging, and do thing some things like the loss of the fairness doctrine and our allowing some pretty incredible levels of media ownership consolidation has had some ill effects (though the death of the fairness doctrine would have little effect on the Internet, anyway, and the main outcome of losing it was the rise of partisan commentary and opinion without balancing counter-point, not more-slanted news—basically, it allowed the current much-maligned "media bubble" effect to get a running start way back in the 1980s, well before the rise of the Web as something normal people used, but that was mostly accomplished through commentary shows, not reporting). I'm just skeptical that we were ever a ton better off in terms of, specifically, news media honesty and integrity than we are now. > 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. Schools have to be damned careful how they treat current events. Parents get pissed off in a hurry over some really, really dumb shit, like "acknowledging basic things about reality that definitely shouldn't be controversial" sorts of shit, and if there's one thing schools hate dealing with, it's pissed-off parents. Start analyzing slant in media reporting in high school, as a teacher, and you're courting a reprimand even if you do your job perfectly and entirely objectively (somehow). "The closest thing to a widely-agreed-upon-to-be-neutral source we can find, presented with minimal commentary" is often the best they can realistically manage, and even that will get angry phone calls from time to time.