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>Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"? No, because it does a poor job at disseminating information. The best you can d

by gruez 1y ago

>Did letting politics go unchecked turn the telephone system into a "cesspool"? No, because it does a poor job at disseminating information. The best you can do is robocall, and that quickly gets hung up on/ignored. > How about the newspapers? The printing press? The second half of the 20th century was more or less a golden age of objective journalism, but it wasn't always that way. Newspapers used to explicitly partisan and had poor journalistic standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Moreover in the 2000s 24/7 cable TV channels were widely criticized for sensationalism to drive viewership. That's the closest analog to /r/all, where there's always some sort of political crisis happening every day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_as...

kragen 1y ago
Yet those very partisan newspapers created a public that was, by all accounts, far better informed than the public of the 20th century you think was a "golden age". I omitted the "vast wasteland" of television on purpose: it's the major medium that suffered pervasive government censorship in the US.
- gruez 1y ago
  >>The second half of the 20th century was more or less a golden age of objective journalism, but it wasn't always that way. Newspapers used to explicitly partisan and had poor journalistic standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism >Yet those very partisan newspapers created a public that was, by all accounts, far better informed than the public of the 20th century you think was a "golden age". Are you claiming that the public was better informed in the 19th century than in the 20th? That's a wild claim to make, not least because the former had far worse literacy rates.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yes, I am. It's a well-substantiated claim. I suggest reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Literacy rates were not far worse; US literacy in 01880 was 80%; in the 01980s it was estimated at 86%.

by gruez 1y ago

kragen 1y ago

Yet those very partisan newspapers created a public that was, by all accounts, far better informed than the public of the 20th century you think was a "golden age". I omitted the "vast wasteland" of television on purpose: it's the major medium that suffered pervasive government censorship in the US.

gruez 1y ago
>>The second half of the 20th century was more or less a golden age of objective journalism, but it wasn't always that way. Newspapers used to explicitly partisan and had poor journalistic standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism >Yet those very partisan newspapers created a public that was, by all accounts, far better informed than the public of the 20th century you think was a "golden age". Are you claiming that the public was better informed in the 19th century than in the 20th? That's a wild claim to make, not least because the former had far worse literacy rates.
- kragen 1y ago
  Yes, I am. It's a well-substantiated claim. I suggest reading Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Literacy rates were not far worse; US literacy in 01880 was 80%; in the 01980s it was estimated at 86%.