I'm no longer a Catholic because of, among other things, Sky King, airing Sunday mornings on NBC right around the scheduled children's mass at St. Anastasia's.
I had yelled at the top of my lungs so often "that's just stupid" that I was encouraged (by special dispensation) to worship at the parish of St. Magnavox along with Sky, Penny, Clipper, Sheriff Mitch and an assortment of villains straight out of the clear blue of the western sky. Not exactly Bertrand Russell, but formative nonetheless.
Religion and politics are just about inseparable; the two things carrying the most warnings of fruitless discussion make up the bulk of everyday civics. The unengaged are blissfully preoccupied with whatever the popular culture is dispensing while the engaged are hard pressed to find what they need to know in any other form.
Time was, capsule summaries of events, references to people by resumé, recollections of scholarly history and so forth were the meat and potatoes of the news business.
In a word: objectivity.
Sure, the papers always sought to increase circulation and there were pages upon pages plastered with display ads, but there was a narrow range of editorial propriety. Opinion was clearly labeled as such.
Broadsheets and tabloids weren't necessarily divided into serious/sensational content though, to many, tabloids' readership was assumed to have forsaken sufficient vocabulary to appreciate robust objectivity. You had your NY Times and Herald Tribune over here and your Daily News and NY Post over there.
Rather than being dispensaries of fluff, many of the tabloids excelled at palatability and entertainment while retaining the core values of the profession.
The early TV networks included news programming in the spirit of public service without burdening it with the necessity to show profitability. There too, the line between objectivity and analysis was adhered to, no doubt with regulatory prodding by the FCC.
Many cite the fairness doctrine, or rather its demise, as key to the mutations which have given us our present-day media landscape. McCarthyism in the 50's was not propped up by the "he said/she said" formula so widespread today. Its reliance on demagoguery and fear mongering could safely be reported without a requirement to give voice to those who perpetrated it. They would be met, in the interest of fairness, with rebuttal only when attempting to poach the objective realm.
The festering feelings of slight among reactionaries, first given voice in the 40's and 50's bloomed fully after the treatment of the Goldwater campaign by de rigeur journalism such that, by the time of the Nixon administration, the nomenclature "liberal biased media" could be successfully overlayed, j'accuse by j'accuse.
A seminal work of pseudo-science by Edith Efron, The News Twisters, climbed the NY Times best sellers list in no small part to bulk buying by the Nixon dirty tricksters. It appeared to catalog pro-left and pro-right references on the various newscasts; the compiling may have been faithful but the designations were entirely subjective. The "victims" of this seeming bias registered one sixth the tally of mentions and that rendered correlations to anyone willing to read or listen.
Notice was served that objectivity was entirely a relative matter.
During the 80's, the FCC revoked its fairness doctrine and an attempt to codify it into law was met with Reagan's veto. Where once the standard of objectivity was applied by professional ethics, while opinionated analysis was forced to include opposing points of view, now it was assumed that caveat emptor and the broadening of sources and outlets would make a satisfactory replacement.
I return to the same less than Russellian motif: that's just stupid!
Evidence abounds that, as the writer Charles P. Pierce has pointed out, facts are that which enough people believe. Senator Moynihan's famous adage moulders: you are entitled to your own facts after all.
Jaundiced reporting or outright fabrication of events, references to people by conveniently skewed polling and high school worthy adjectives, spinning history in one's favor for premises and so forth is the meat and potatoes of our modern news business.
In a word: hackery.
