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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 a
by 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 agoYes, 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%.