Come along on a quick, blurry drone flight over the history of journalism in America. This comes to mind now as I see complaints online that the mainstream media are not covering the massive protests today against the Republican administration
When the First Amendment established freedom of the press, the entire country didn't even take up the entire east coast of what we call the United States today.
Newspaper circulation was limited to a small radius around the point of publication. Editors and publishers felt no obligation to be neutral, but the low startup cost meant that multiple papers could cover a heavily populated area. Advertiser-supported funding didn't threaten to warp coverage, because advertisers were already sympathetic to the paper's editorial stance or they could be replaced if they objected to content and took their business elsewhere.
As the country grew, so did the influence of major publications. As controversies grew heated, sometimes a newspaper publisher would be murdered and their offices destroyed, but the general business model managed to survive. That tended to happen in smaller market areas, so it didn't disrupt the industry as a whole.
By the end of the 19th Century, newspapers wielded massive power. This held up all the way to the late 20th Century. Television pulled some revenue and had greater impact on the senses, because of moving pictures and audio, but broadcast presentations couldn't go into the depth of analysis that print articles could. And newspapers were always on. A newspaper could pass from hand to hand for hours or days.
The influence of the written word on anyone who can read retains its impact as it goes from a breaking story to old news to history. The impact may vary at each of those stages, but it can actually increase at the history stage, as unfolding events after it was new give it more significance. Video -- especially if the broadcaster opts not to archive it -- only lives for as long as it takes to perform it. It's much harder to review in sections, too. Reread this paragraph a few times and compare it to rewinding a video to exactly the right spot over and over.
Whatever the medium, news outlets seemed to prize their position as a foil to the government. They might not be opposed, but they represented the critical, independent observer. The people had a right to know, and journalists had a Constitutionally protected role in providing that knowledge.
Prosperity makes life more expensive. Subsistence is a basic equation: get enough food and find sufficient shelter to survive whatever conditions nature is throwing at you. Once subsistence is assured, the human mind starts looking for something else to do. This cave is damp, this hut is leaky. The trail to the next village could be a little smoother. Speaking of the next village, those smug bastards have some pretty nice farm land, and they don't look so tough... Next thing you know, you have a major civilization, where basic shelter costs you more than you can scrape up from this thing you have now called a job.
Running a business, especially a news business, in a prosperous, civilized country takes a lot more money than it did in the 18th and at least the first half of the 19th centuries. At the same time, multiple factors have reduced Americans' ability and willingness to read. I have no solid statistics on it because I can't be bothered to look them up, but the dominant forms of Internet content certainly seem to be video based, while television news and news-imitating programs dominate in forming public opinion. Blogs of the early 2000s gave way quickly to video blogs and now to quick hits like TikTok.
The internet supports small content providers, but they rent their space from the large (or huge) corporations that own the actual hosting sites. Huge corporations, meanwhile, blast out their content directly over online and broadcast channels. Newspapers put content online, constrained then by the space limitations and intrusive ad formats of those spaces, losing all of the advantages of paper publication. I live beyond the reach of any major newspaper, so I haven't seen an actual paper paper in years. But I can subscribe to the web versions of major papers all over the world. Or I could if I could afford it.
News has always been curated. "All the news that's fit to print" reflects the editors' opinion of what's fit to print. When I worked for a small weekly paper I joked that our motto was "all the news that fits." The "news hole" is what's left on the page after that edition's ads are blocked in. The size of your news space is determined by your ad revenue. That revenue also has to pay the rest of the newspaper's overhead.
Advertisers generally don't care about the news. They care about whether a publication or broadcast outlet can deliver their message to a lot of eyeballs. If enough people aren't reading stuff on paper, it doesn't matter that the paper medium was much better at presenting detailed information. Detailed information is no longer reliable bait for enough people to reward the advertisers' investment.
Advertisers do care about news-imitating content that will stimulate desirable buying or voting behavior. It doesn't have to be true. That's not just a sad truth about human susceptibility to gossip, it's legally true since the 1980s, when the Republican administration got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which required genuine balance in presenting controversial topics on broadcast media, and made hysterical exaggeration more difficult. "Free speech" advocates said that this stifled free expression -- i.e lying -- and demanded its removal. The conservative administration knew a good thing when they saw it, realizing that their positions never polled well when presented in a non-partisan way. So down went the Fairness Doctrine and up went Fox News and talk radio.
Broadcast news had an advantage over print in reaching rural areas, which was later boosted significantly by cable television. Small local newspapers could only reach so far and cover so much. Big papers would mail out to anyone willing to pay, but news wasn't fresh when it arrived. The simple beliefs and perceived wisdom of rural populations living closer to basic subsistence is no more valid than the opinions of city dwellers who have lived for generations cut off from firsthand contact with agriculture. These demographics, isolated from each other, shared some similar receptiveness to misleading content, albeit from opposite gaps in their lived experiences.
Fox disguised their right wing goals by hosting liberal entertainment content, but their "news" department has now evolved into a blatant megaphone for authoritarianism. The corporation plays hardball with cable providers, which raises fees for cable subscribers and forces Fox onto basic cable lineups with no opt out.
As corporate consolidation has cut down the number of corporations that fund broadcast outlets, the natural inclination of capitalism toward authoritarianism shapes the content that you are allowed to see. Similar pressures fall on print media, with the Wall Street Journal, for instance, owned by the same corporation that owns Fox. And of course Jeff Bezos, lovable potentate of Amazon, drew a lot of attention to his ownership of the venerable Washington Post when he kneecapped their editorial integrity before the 2024 election.
Gone are the days when you could pick up a newspaper with a reasonable expectation that you would find bland, boring, but factual content about issues of importance. Fans of the new dispersed media model of independent journalists all over the internet will say that even then you couldn't trust that the big paper wasn't burying something that the ownership didn't want the common folk to know. But now you can't trust that the valiant independent muckraker of your choice isn't blatantly making shit up or hiding facts just as much as the big corporations are. You may have more options for fact checking your fact checkers, but you have to put in the time and find the sources to do so.
If Daniel Ellsberg sent his bombshell information to the New York Times today, they'd rat him out to the government in seconds. Either that or the reporters who received the information would sit on it until they could put out a lucrative book a year or two later. Prove me wrong, Gray Lady. But finding a replacement media channel that we all can share is impossible. When there were three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers, we all argued from the same fact sheet. Now the political discussion has to weed through all of the relevant information and dismiss influence operations and insane conspiracy theories every damn day.
I don't present news here. I just present emotional support. And dismissive insults as appropriate, but that's emotionally supportive to people who share my point of view. Good luck out there!
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