Newspapers have always had bias. They knew it, everybody knew it. But the most respected ones kept it separate from the news. You could pick up the leading newspaper in a city and read news on the front page, and opinions on the back page. The news stories stuck to fact--who, what, where, when, how. Why was reported if known, if not the why was left to editorial speculation which was usually withheld awaiting more facts.
Reporters were professional, had degrees in or at last had studied journalism and knew how to do ethical reporting. There were always other papers, with varying degrees of ethics. Every paper had a gossip column that reported rumor, but it was presented as such, but there were "scandal rags" that could be depended on to print unverified but titillating stories that were short on fact but long on speculation. And everyone new which was which.
The most ethical papers were careful to protect their reputations by being careful what they printed. Read "All the President's Men" about the Watergate story, or watch the movie--especially the scene where they have the editorial board meeting to decide whether or not they should print the story. Eventually they asked the owner of the paper. Freedom of the press existed, but it was still regulated, not by the government but by ethics, and having freedom of the press was reserved to those who owned the presses.
Then we got the Internet, and the world wide web, and web logs--blogs. Suddenly, everyone owned a press. Get a web page, put up a blog and presto, you are a journalist. Matt Drudge turned it into a career. So did many others wannabe Drudges. But the editorial board is between their ears and there is no second opinion to consider before they go to press.
Nor is their a separate op-ed page. News is mixed with opinion, speculation and rumor is mixed with fact, and often even presented as fact. The need to confirm anything is avoided by not reporting anything new, but by reporting or quoting what another source has said, so they can say "Hey, they said it, not me. I'm just reporting what they said." but always with commentary and opinion which may spin the original story in ways the original author never intended.
All this is for one purpose: to get attention. Either attention to oneself, or attention to the page which generates ad revenue based on page views. There are no ethics in the quest for eyeballs on the page. And it works. It works so well that people aren't reading newspapers and the print publishers have had to respond by getting on the web themselves. Once there, they have to compete directly with the bloggers, and factual stories are often boring and just don't attract the eyeballs. Headlines are written to attract eyeballs but they are often so sensationalized that they bear little relation to the story they head. Unfortunately, many readers never get past the headlines.
And so we have the journalistic mess we are in today. Nobody says they trust the media, especially the media everybody else watches or reads. (We all seem to trust the media that we watch and read, perhaps because it appeals to our confirmation bias, but that is another subject deserving its own post).
Note in the above that there is a lot of opinion mixed with fact. I haven't identified either, nor (except for a book and movie title) given any source for verification. If you want to accept what I've written, you have to take it at face value or do a lot of work on your own with no help from me. This is par for the course. I hate it but I seem to have become what I hate. Maybe I should try hating thin, rich people.
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