The Good Ol' Days That Never Were

A good illustration of how trends people imagine were about evolving civic awareness, changing mores, cultural progress were actually driven by a media business model. https://t.co/u8r1XVOv6p

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 19, 2023

I still remember when Dallas had two newspapers: the moss-back conservative "Dallas Morning News," and the "liberal" (more by contrast than anything) Dallas Times Herald. One was a morning paper, the other an evening paper, which eventually ran Molly Ivins' column after she left the NYT. My father was a devoted "Morning News" reader, and would have nothing to do with the Times Herald.

Houston had the Houston Post ("liberal") and the Houston Chronicle ("conservative").  The town I grew up in had one newspaper, and it usually made the DMN look wildly liberal and almost progressive by contrast.  Of course there was the Manchester Union Leader of legendary reactionary reputation, and the WSJ still has the most reactionarly editorial page in America.  The NYT is supposed to be liberal, but... please!  All these papers bowed down to the God of Objectivity, and regularly made sacrifices to it (they still do).  Which didn't keep us from getting the Whitewater and WMD fiascos of the NYT (which should have forever destroyed the paper's reputation as "liberal" as well as its fealty to "objective journalism."  People complaining about "both sides" now, valid as those complaints are, obviously don't remember those two abject failures of journalism for which the NYT paid no price at all.)

Objectivity was also the Lord of the Land when the Big Three dominated the airwaves (when they were airwaves).  Walter Cronkite ended every news half-hour (all the news that fits into 25 minutes!) with the same phrase:  "That's the way it is!"  Which looks more and more damning as the years fade.  I had a good friend, an adult, who turned Cronkite off forever when she realized the import of that statement.  It took me 30 years to realize she was right. I grew up in the Cronkite bubble.  I couldn't see the problem.  News was all that was really worthy.  And nightly news programs offered all the news that fit in 30 minutes, around commercials.  If it didn't fit, it wasn't news; and not being news, it didn't really matter.  "That's the way it is."

That's the "business model" JMM is talking about.  "Objectivity" as presented by the NYT and WaPo and various imitators.  Honestly, news stories in the DMN were sometimes very different takes on local and state (even national) matters than what the Times Herald reported, but that's what people paid for, and they were convinced their paper was objective, and yours was biased.

Same as it ever was.  So are we really "returning" to the 19th century?  And was the 20th (the era of Pulitzer, who fathered "yellow journalism" and bought his reputation with the prize given now in his name) really that much of an improvement?  Or is that just the narrative we tell ourselves because the future hasn't fulfilled it's promise of endless prosperity and flying cars we were sure was coming with the post-war boom of the '50's?

The past is never over; it isn't even past.