The recent history of press bias
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread:
Thread: On Media Narratives
1. Once upon a time, the legacy media controlled the daily news narrative. There were three principal broadcast TV networks which took their nightly news cues from the NYT and, secondarily, the WaPo.
— Stu Cvrk (@STUinSD) August 21, 2019
It’s a long thread with many parts, so I’m going to combine many of the tweets here as though it were a single article, and add my own comments after each section.
Picking it up after the tweet I just embedded:
Before cable TV, talk radio, and the rise of social media, the news of the day moved slooooowly and could be controlled and shaped by the powers-that-be…
Back in the day, the NYT (there was only a “print edition”) broke the news of the day each morning, which was used directly by other major and minor newspapers and/or repeated by the Associated Press and United Press International news services across the land.
Americans were conditioned over time to catch daily news summaries each evening on their favorite broadcast TV network. The leading stories on those broadcasts were almost always the major news stories printed by that day’s edition of the NYT…
I remember it more or less that way, except that when something very dramatic happened, regular programming was suspended and the news moved rather quickly. It had to be something major, of course—the assassination of JFK comes to mind—but the news was quite responsive even in those days, as long as the event was big enough.
Continued:
In those days, the Democrat Party almost completely controlled the political narrative largely thanks to their media allies at the NYT and other major newspapers, as well as at the three broadcast TV networks. But there was at least a veneer of “impartiality” in those days…
…the media narrative was tightly controlled and aligned with the liberal political establishment’s policy objectives.
The only conservative voices were a few token columnists on the op-ed pages and a few conservative magazines with tiny subscription bases, such as National Review, The American Spectator, Human Events, and the Conservative Chronicles.
I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration, although only somewhat. But even I, a New Yorker and daily reader of the Times, was exposed to some conservative voices here and there. William F. Buckley was quite prominent on television, for example, with his show Firing Line. Granted, it was on public TV, but can you imagine a show like that given a slot on public TV today? Here’s the show’s history, including how it managed to breach the liberal wall and be aired on PBS in the first place:
In 1971, Firing Line moved to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) under the auspices of the Southern Educational Communications Association, an arm of South Carolina Educational Television. This was somewhat unusual, given the reputation among many conservatives that PBS unfairly discriminated against non-liberal viewpoints in its other programming. SECA/SCETV, however, was one of the very few public broadcasting entities of the time that was sympathetic to the conservative movement. Besides, the program had already been carried by a number of individual PBS (and its predecessor National Educational Television) stations for a number of years.
Because the program received a relatively unfavorable Sunday evening timeslot on PBS’ schedule in the early 1970s, Buckley and long-time director Warren Steibel briefly attempted to return Firing Line to commercial TV, but could not find sponsors. Thus, the program would remain on PBS until Buckley and Steibel discontinued production on December 17, 1999, with Buckley’s final episode airing December 26, 1999.
In addition, Buckley was a regular on late night talk shows. Aside from Buckley, though, I can’t recall others given such a platform.
More:
The stifling of conservative voices by the Establishment received a big course correction with the election of President Reagan in 1980. The Fairness Doctrine, which in reality was used to control political discourse in the media, was abolished.
And a conservative upstart by the name of Rush Limbaugh led the rise of conservative talk radio, and he paved the way for a veritable explosion of alternative media sources, which broke the Establishment’s chokehold on the daily news narrative.
Yes, Limbaugh was an outrage, according to the liberal point of view. How was it that this upstart troglodyte had managed to penetrate the defenses and gain an audience?
Continued:
Of course, the other major event essentially concurrent with Rush’s debut on August 1988 was the development of the Internet…
And thankfully, the Internet was unleashed and has been essentially unregulated unto the present day. The Internet led to an explosion of news sources and a goldmine for alternative and independent news media.
Unto the present day. But several ways around this have been found, in the present day. One is the use of social media to mob, dox, and attack anyone insufficiently leftist. So the internet has become a force for shutting down speech the leftists don’t like. In addition, of course, we have ideological gaming of search algorithms as well as banning and/or limiting people espousing politics on the right.
More:
…One by-product of the Internet age and the proliferation of cable news networks was the acceleration of the news cycle to the point of “instantaneous news” virtually “in the moment.”
No longer could the daily narrative be shaped in the normal way by the legacy media. And the profusion of voices conveying “news” has only accelerated with the advent of social media. The Establishment’s daily narrative was diluted by dozens of other voices.
As I already said, that is starting to end. The left has been finding creative ways to attenuate and/or block those “dozens of other voices,” although many of them still get through.
Continued:
…Another result was the blurring of the lines between “investigative” and hard news journalists versus “opinion journalists” – in effect, the lack of differentiation between the news pages and the opinion pages in the media these days.
The legacy media began to convey opinions even in hard news, and the political spin was invariably liberal and obvious to the discerning news consumer. That led to further fracturing of news sources, with the legacy media losing significant market share (and $$!).
I think the timing is wrong here. It’s been getting worse and worse over time, but the beginning of this sort of thing was with Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War. I chronicled this event in some detail here as well as here.
More from the Tweet thread:
And thus, the political battle lines became more pronounced with each passing year, with the legacy media and their Establishment backers trying to regain market share and control of the news cycle and narrative, by hook or by crook.
Can’t quarrel with that description.
[ADDEMDUM: Here’s some history on the Times’ political leanings.]
Twitter hint. Threadreader stitches the thread into rope. This thread, for example, is at
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1164211644098129920.html
Check it out.
Thank you Gerard. That is an excellent link.
How was it that this upstart troglodyte had managed to penetrate the defenses and gain an audience?
oh, thats easy… it wasnt the internet per se…
what it was, was cable…
“Video killed the radio star”
AM was all but dead.. and guess where talk radio went to?
like late night advertising turning ron popiels fathers inventions into billions cheap
AM was cheap and more open..
Since he was 16, Limbaugh has worked as a radio personality, originally as a disc jockey. His talk show began in 1984 at Sacramento, California radio station KFBK am 1530
Its daytime signal covers much of the northern portion of the state, from the northern Sacramento Valley to the San Francisco Bay Area and the fringes of the Central Valley. At night, it reaches much of the western half of North America.
Journalists for the most part, are propaganda messenger. This is not something that started 50 years ago.
the beginning of this sort of thing was with Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War.
that’s a bit late… Walter Duranty would be upset to lose the throne..
[not to mention Willi Muzenberg and Harper… ]
Denial of the Holodomor is the assertion that the 1932–1933 Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing the scale and significance of the famine
It is their opinion that this is untrue..
This denial and suppression of information about the famine was made in official Soviet propaganda from the very beginning until the 1980s. It was supported by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including The New York Times’ Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the man-made famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. According to Robert Conquest, it was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting the Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion, to be followed by similar campaigns over the Moscow Trials and denial of the Gulag labor camp system.
and the nail in the proverbial coffin?
His opinion got him a Pulitzer…
and that reward for such opinion became de rigeur
if your curious..
Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize
https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty
Useful Idiots – Washington Examiner
Double Lives / Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals
by Stephen Koch
History is more entertaining than Netflix…
The ‘Innocents’ Clubs’
above i will file under, do you Know what you think you Know?
however, this next excerpt is real entertaining as to forming “public opinion”
Munzenberg’s men
http://www.aei.org/publication/munzenbergs-men/
He created the lefts youths superiority complex over knowing communism and socialism is the answer, how could anything else be so..
funny how we will pay attention to Goebbels who did his work on German minds
Willi was so slick, we forget him – cause we might be afraid of what he did to American and Western minds
better than the plot of the latest female 007 Jane Bond…
Artfldgr:
Duranty deserves his own throne. But it’s a different throne than the one I was referring to when I mentioned Cronkite. Cronkite purposely mixed opinion journalism with reporting.
Duranty did something somewhat different. He lied in a coverup of what was really happening in the Soviet Union.
And then there’s this guy.
Robert Novak was a conservative guy that could often be seen on a few different networks in the past, though I think PBS might have been the most frequent one.
He certainly wasn’t as suave as Buckley, and I don’t recollect anything particularly special about his point of views, but he would reliably give the conservative “common wisdom.” The thing I liked a bit about him was his curmudgeon personality and the feeling that he didn’t suck up to anyone.
TommyJay:
There was also William Safire, moderate-to-conservative columnist for the Times for over 30 years.
From Artfldgr’s quotes above:
I just finished reading a post linked by Edward on the “slavery” thread, and it was eerily relevant — the Democrats have not changed since the 1800s.
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2019/08/1619-wondering-why-slavery-persisted.html
I remember moderate-liberal columnists from the 1960s like Joseph Alsop and Max Lerner who would be right-wing troglodytes by today’s standards.
Neo’s post on Castro has some good comments (of course!) and shows that very little has escaped the notice of right-wing readers, even though the MSM has engaged in biased reporting for decades.
Maybe a critical mass of reality is moving toward the tipping point of (somehow) destroying their influence, though they are certainly working hard on shoring up the slag heap.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124290
Stupid Hippie on September 8, 2009 at 3:24 pm said:
I once read a book extolling Fidel and hs utopian Cuba, where literacy was close to 100%, healthcare was universal, and all the Cubans were “happy,” according to a leftist propagandist. I actually believed that tripe until I read Armando Valladeros’ excellent book “Against All Hope,” exposing Fidel’s brutal island prison, a Cuban “Gulag Archipelago.” Thank God for the survivors who speak out at great personal risk to counter the propaganda.
Thank God for the bloggers and radio talkers and the few honest journalists who counter the NYT and MSM. I am trying to research Hugo Chavez and how he managed to take control of Venezuela. The parallels to Obama are striking.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124246
Nolanimrod on September 8, 2009 at 7:05 am said:
It’s usually the intellectuals who possess sufficient intellect to rationalize the brutality, tyranny, and sadism which always goes along with regimes of this sort.
Luckily I was never an intellectual. I fervently believed in the promise of communism until 1968 when the tanks rumbled into Prague.
The world had just seen the answer to “Communism with a human face.”
Since then the Prague nightmare has happened again and again and again. Each time the intelligentsia has chided us to get over our reactionary resistance.
William Ayers is designing curricula for America’s children. His pal is having them think really, really hard how they can help the cause.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124244
Gringo on September 8, 2009 at 5:15 am said:
Hitler, Chavez, and Castro all had unsuccessful coup attempts before assuming power. How much better the world would have been if all three had been executed for their coup attempts. Mercy at times is not mercy. Calderan Venezuelan President who pardoned Chavez is still living, in his 90s. One Venezuelan blogger wrote that he wanted Caldera to live until he was 150,to longer live with the consequences of having pardoned Chavez.
A recent Gallup poll showed that Barack Obama and Donald Trump had exactly the same approval rating at the same point in their presidencies. The media coverage of Obama was more than 75% positive, the coverage of Trump more than 85% negative. This would seem to indicate that not only is the media less effective than they would have us believe but indeed have practically no influence at all.
The American people are the smartest people in all history. That’s not opinion, that’s fact. Queue the numbers. They’re smart enough to ignore the blatherings emanating from the box in the corner.
True story: An agronomist from a local university went to a farm to teach the farmer how to get more yield from his crops. The farmer posed the following question, “Horses, cows and rabbits all eat the same food yet their scat is variously chunks, patties and pellets. Why is that?”. The agronomist answered that he didn’t rightly know. The farmer said “You don’t know shit and you’re going to teach me how to farm?”.
The ThreadReader version makes it much easier to follow these long Twitter threads, which are basically essay-posts broken into tiny bite sized pieces.
Which I thoroughly loathe and abominate.
The writer reminds us of Journolist, btw, and adds comments on the NYT’s pivot from Trump-as-traitor to Trump-as-racist.