I'd actually be pretty interested in a kind of statistical study of new media bias over the decades. I think that'd be hard as hell to construct, owing in part

I'd actually be pretty interested in a kind of statistical study of new media bias over the decades. I think that'd be hard as hell to construct, owing in part to there being a lot of ways news media can introduce bias, some of which are really hard to spot without a great deal of context, but it might be interesting. I do think some of the shift has been not in the availability of quality news media, but in the kind of news media people actually "consume". It's not like doctor's waiting rooms were playing 24/7 cable "news" in 1965—because there was no such thing, and because the doctor's office waiting room probably didn't have a TV in it. AP Wire and several news periodicals and a few papers of more-or-less decent quality do exist, but if you don't seek them out your ambient, if you will, exposure to "news" will mostly be shit, that much I'd agree with. I do think there's been some "the medium is the message" effect in news becoming a 24/7/365 product rather than something more focused, but I also think that's more on top of or in addition to the decent aspects of older news media, not instead of. But, you might be right, and I might be wrong. Maybe our news media really was wildly better than it is now, in a narrow window of time in post-war America. Or maybe we're just interpreting "100 'units' of news available, 40 of which are pretty good" versus "10,000 'units' of news available, 1,000 of which are pretty good" differently—depending on one's perspective, either of those could be regarded as worse than the other. Or—I can see this being the case, for sure—maybe I'm not giving enough weight to what's popular, versus what's available, when evaluating differences in the news media landscape. What's popular now is, kinda, a product that didn't even exist before the late '80s or so. A new category of news that needs, as raw material, almost more "news" than actually exists, and needs to compete with hyper-palatable available-on-tap entertainment, for eyeballs and attention. Maybe the expansion of entertainment-availability in general deserves some consideration, when it comes to what media's like now. Maybe too many options are a bad thing, actually (see: Fox News insiders fretting that reporting the truth might lose them some of their audience, and so, money—because there are plenty of other outlets willing to lie, readily available at the click of a mouse)