/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I think things were better back then, simply because the media was more skeptical of itself. Even after the idea of unbiased, objective journalism was formed and took hold, they were still close enough to the preceding era to know that everyone is inherently biased, and there's not much you can do about that except being diligent about checking others, and getting others to check you in turn. And university educations were far less common back then; journalists were almost always local and could spring up from any walk of life. And it wasn't that hard to find people who knew how to write - America was a surprisingly literate nation. There's been articles and such on this; even Tocqueville observed it. Americans had something like a 90% literacy rate, literally everyone read often, and the main means of communication with distant friends (i.e. 40 miles away or more) was letters. So "being able to write" wasn't synonymous with "college education." So newsrooms were a lot more diverse. And that didn't make them bad reporters, either. I've even seen modern journalists suggesting that a bachelors degree in journalism is a waste of time - you should get a degree in history, or economics, or whatever topic you hope to report on, and then learn the nuts and bolts of journalistic writing technique on-the-job or at a postgrad journalism school.

In our modern era, though, journalists almost all have similar motivations (Save The World,) go through college together (where they're exposed to a mostly homogeneous ideology from staff and/or the mostly homogeneous populace of idealistic energetic 20-something students,) and then they all walk into a newsroom together.

You add this to the modern conception of objective journalism, i.e. "We Are Above The Bias, We Are The Guardians Of The Free World, On A Holy Quest To Protect All," and you can see where media bias comes from. Sure, collusion and deliberate lies exist, but for the most part it's just a product of who journalists are; a product of some of their best qualities, in fact.