re: #126 Quilly Mammoth

There is no un-biased media. There never has been. Back “when” you knew which party your paper supported. Simply look at the papers in the 19th century; whom they supported and how they did it caused the term Yellow Journalism to be created about the sales war between Pulitzer and Hearst. Somehow, in the 20th century, we got the idea (promoted by the media) that the media should be and strove for fairness.

Hogwash.

Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are flip sides of the same coin. That coin is “buy my side”, with the emphasis on buy. I know some will argue that Beck is loonier…but really, after you go past a certain point it doesn’t really matter.

Hearst’s dislike for President McKinley was so intense, and so mirrored by his main columnists, that after McKinley was shot an Ambrose Bierce poem about the assassination of Gov Goebel of Kentucky was twisted to imply that Hearst’s papers had caused Leon Czolgosz to do the deed.

None of this is new. It’s been this way since the detractors of Plato and will probably be this way until the sun burns out.

Exactly. The idea of an unbiased press would have been quite alien to the Founding Fathers. The allegedly unbiased press really originated with wire services like Reuters and AP during the mid nineteenth century. Since they had to feed news to a variety of outlets with widely differing biases, they had to tout their own neutrality and lack of bias. Inevitably though, the wires developed their own biases. This crept subtly into their feeds and became dominant because the subscriber outlets were helpless without those feeds. This was really the origin of the “media-industrial complex” as I call it. The wire services, and their dominant internal biases, served to unify, and eventually to characterize, the outlook of the individual subscribers.