Addressing your other points: Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Ar

Addressing your other points: Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO). Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service. I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g> Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain: <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>