Are you going to engage or be a dick? They all didn't just lie for a partisan purpose all the time. Why not?
Replies
Remember the Maine!
aug 5, 2025, 12:51 am • 3 0 • view
aug 5, 2025, 12:48 am • 3 0 • view
Nuance is dead
aug 5, 2025, 12:52 am • 0 0 • view
Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst would like to have a word on the whole partisanship thing.
aug 5, 2025, 12:52 am • 2 0 • view
Frankly you are to abjectly ignorant of American history, and too proud of it, to engage beyond mocking your bumptiousness. Then there's your dishonest goalpost-moving.
aug 5, 2025, 12:47 am • 56 0 • view
I'm well aware of yellow journalism and all the rest. My question was based on the fact that there was a time since then that journalism had trust and there were reporters with large profiles with will regarded integrity and a level of attempted honesty. Why? But hey, get your cute responses.
aug 5, 2025, 12:55 am • 0 0 • view
Wow, that was all packed into "why didn't they?" That's super efficient. Look man. You came in hot and you made an ass of yourself and now you're doubling down and repositioning.
aug 5, 2025, 12:59 am • 31 0 • view
Can I just say: for profit media owned by big corporations suck. We don’t need new laws to get past theM, we need independent media whose goals are journalism and not neverending profit.
aug 5, 2025, 8:10 am • 0 0 • view
And guess what! That’s happening! Support the Bulwark and Zeteo, they are the real deal. There’s your damn fairness doctrine. The problem is there is money to be made in infotainment and preaching to the choir.
aug 5, 2025, 8:10 am • 1 0 • view
Fox is successful because a bunch of people WANT TO be in that far right cult. How the hell can the state mandate us out of that? Also: CNN, the NYT, the Washington Post, they all suck these days too.
aug 5, 2025, 8:10 am • 2 0 • view
The fairness doctrine won’t fix that, we just have to make and support organizations that do REAL OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM!!! Welcome to the free world everyone! You can’t legislate us into the perfect society, we have to MAKE those organizations that will make a better country.
aug 5, 2025, 8:10 am • 1 0 • view
I don’t want to live in a right wing daddy state or a left wing mommy state, and none of you should either. Because eventually SOMEONE WE ALL HATE will democratically win those governments and use that power to make it shitty for everyone
aug 5, 2025, 8:10 am • 1 0 • view
Is it new for outlets to coordinate with a president? I get that Hearst did terrible things but was he coordinating with McKinley for financial gain? Can a president pay a newspaper to lie? Is that different from coercion?
aug 5, 2025, 2:53 am • 0 0 • view
Is there a net difference between a president or political candidate paying a newspaper to lie and the newspaper doing it if their own free will?
aug 5, 2025, 12:13 pm • 0 0 • view
I think so. Do you disagree? Seems like paying a paper would be fraud or bribery. But of course the legal system is so broken, who knows?
aug 5, 2025, 12:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Papers run ads and sponsored editorials all the time. I don’t think the “why” of the lie makes a net difference.
aug 5, 2025, 12:27 pm • 0 0 • view
Both of those examples are understood as commerce. Is it legal for a politician to pay a reporter to write lies and conceal the agreement?
aug 5, 2025, 12:36 pm • 0 0 • view
Why wouldn’t it be?
aug 5, 2025, 12:56 pm • 0 0 • view
Because it’s an undisclosed financial relationship.
aug 5, 2025, 1:00 pm • 0 0 • view
Or you assumed more than my question included. "Why didnt they lie?" Oh, he must be an idiot and thinks all journalists are always honest all the time. What a rube.. hahaha...
aug 5, 2025, 1:04 am • 0 0 • view
Journalistic "neutrality" was, at best, a 40 year recent aberration from the norm. Journalism has always been a partisan, muckraking business. Sorry, there were no neutral voices on the "Des Moines Democrat And Telegraph"
aug 5, 2025, 1:00 am • 5 0 • view
Thank you for the honest engagement. Yes. This was exactly my point. Why did that aberration occur?
aug 5, 2025, 1:06 am • 1 0 • view
McCarthyism, the backlash against segregation, and Vietnam. Three back to back social crises that threatened free speech generally and put journalism as an institution on a more defensive "fuck the system no matter who's in charge" posture. That ended by 9/11 and the advent of the "access" era.
aug 5, 2025, 1:25 am • 3 0 • view
This is the least convincing retcon since Worf refused to explain Klingon foreheads.
aug 5, 2025, 1:08 am • 19 0 • view
We do not discuss it with outsiders.
aug 6, 2025, 12:00 am • 1 0 • view
Only easy to retcon my 3 word original question in your own bumpy forehead
aug 5, 2025, 1:17 am • 0 0 • view
Your original question was "Why didn't they lie?" Literally everyone's entirely justified reaction was "They did. All the time. Are you insane?" Because even in the 70s when the political landscape was so tumultuous that they couldn't afford to pick a side, they were STILL lying their asses off.
aug 6, 2025, 12:14 am • 0 0 • view
Are "they" in the room with us now?
aug 6, 2025, 1:14 am • 0 0 • view
How the hell should I know? You think I've been tracking the day to day movements of 80 year old journalists well enough to know whether or not they're in the room with YOU? What are you, insane?
aug 6, 2025, 1:27 am • 0 0 • view
Let me teach you the way of The Pope. He chooses one victim per day to go heads to heads with. Today is your lucky day. It's not a pretty sight. Ken has a sharp legal brain and wields it like sword.
aug 5, 2025, 12:58 am • 3 0 • view
True. Sometimes they lied for personal gain.
aug 5, 2025, 12:57 am • 2 0 • view
No wonder trump won
aug 5, 2025, 12:58 am • 1 0 • view
Yes, Trump won because people won't congratulate you for your personal ignorance and inability to admit you are wrong.
aug 5, 2025, 1:00 am • 34 1 • view
Wrong about what? Seriously. I asked a question. I didn't create a premise. I asked a question and you assumed I was an idiot. Wrong about what?
aug 5, 2025, 1:05 am • 0 0 • view
Retired newsroom journalist here, now freelancing and getting intimately acquainted with larger picture. I think you mean to address the dif over time between falsehood degree and audience size, rather than “nuance.” Examining their whole history, newspapers have been reliably monstrous. But …
aug 5, 2025, 1:33 am • 2 0 • view
… you’re right in saying there have been periods of credible journalism holding sway in the mainstream. If your question is Why didn’t everyone lie all the time, when they could have? I’d say answer is …
aug 5, 2025, 1:34 am • 3 0 • view
… a blend: collective sense of “truth” b/c most Americans read/watched same few somewhat regulated sources; financial support (incl. legal protection) of reporters/outlets seeking that; market of (as mentioned) relatively few and notably un-silo’d sources.
aug 5, 2025, 1:35 am • 2 0 • view
Thank you. Understandable but the shared sense of "truth" was the same as it was with Hearst, no? And pouring lies into the collective was profitable. So why did honesty or attempted honest journalism anyway, ever take hold at any point? Just enough, but not too many, journalistic sources?
aug 5, 2025, 1:44 am • 0 0 • view
No.
aug 5, 2025, 3:20 am • 0 0 • view
In my lifetime, perhaps because of Vietnam. It is late and I am drawing a blank. I'm thinking in terms of TV rather than print. Bill Moyers is my absolute hero. Tom Brokaw. I know there are more.
aug 5, 2025, 4:43 am • 0 0 • view
They most certainly did.
aug 5, 2025, 3:11 am • 0 0 • view
Historically, media in America has been partisan far longer than it hasn’t. Like virtually the entire 19th century.
aug 5, 2025, 12:45 am • 11 0 • view
Take a look at the history of the Chicago Tribune. FDR wanted to sue them for publishing something during WWII. Sorry can't remember if it was was plans or war secrets...
aug 5, 2025, 12:47 am • 0 0 • view
Or go back to when it was turned into a Republican organ by Joseph Medill before the Civil War. Going to be hard to find a paper that wasn’t blatantly partisan in that era. The idea of non-partisan press was non-existent until around the turn of the 20th
aug 5, 2025, 12:50 am • 2 0 • view
And even then it still wasn’t universal, as evidenced by Hearst among others.
aug 5, 2025, 12:50 am • 0 0 • view
A important difference between then and now, as far as I know, is the elite being less plugged into the partisan media. The yellow press reached a mass audience but the president wasn’t reading Hearst’s warmongering. Whereas now, uh
aug 5, 2025, 12:48 am • 0 0 • view
The extent to which partisan media cooking brains is now an elite phenomenon is underrated
aug 5, 2025, 12:49 am • 1 0 • view
Consuming print media took work. Turning on Fox or YouTube or Tik Tok is just killing time. And brain cells.
aug 5, 2025, 12:51 am • 2 1 • view
Also this, yeah
aug 5, 2025, 12:52 am • 0 0 • view
But McKinley was reading Pulitzer’s, which was a huge factor in the start of the Spanish American war. The Journal and World did everything but blow up the Maine themselves.
aug 5, 2025, 12:53 am • 4 0 • view
I do think there’s a difference in degree, maybe in kind, between that and the effect X / Truth Social, Fox, et al are now having on conservative elites. (+ arguably the effect old Twitter had on liberal ones til quite recently) Much more engagement with it and especially participation in making it
aug 5, 2025, 12:58 am • 0 0 • view
I agree there. We’ve seen for a couple of decades that the GOP is less interested in governance than their next Fox News hit.
aug 5, 2025, 2:04 am • 1 0 • view
The first writing I was paid for appeared in Foster’s Daily Democrat, founded 1873, and still going strong in southern New Hampshire. It was founded by a rabidly anti-Lincoln editor and leaned hard right for most of its history.
aug 5, 2025, 10:09 am • 2 0 • view
I wrote a free-lance piece once for the Tallahassee Democrat. Local paper here is the Arizona Republic, shortened from the original name of Republican. Facts out there in plain sight that most people never think about.
aug 5, 2025, 2:37 pm • 1 0 • view
This is just false. Read some history.
aug 5, 2025, 12:49 am • 1 0 • view
Every journalist? For every outlet? All the time? Nuance is dead.
aug 5, 2025, 12:58 am • 0 0 • view