re: #22 CuriousLurker

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

Pretty accurate. Reading Twain talking about newspaper editors is pretty interesting and entertaining.

But it was also a general period when print medium was more widespread and under local control. A town above a certain size would have multiple papers which could then have their partisan editorial split and between the two you could sort of tweak out what was factual and what was spin.

Post-WW2 control has centralized, most cities are down to a single paper (whose owner probably also controls one or more of the local TV stations at this point), and news reporting is more heavily controlled in its biases. Plus the fact that the news department is no longer quasi-independent from the marketing, sales, and entertainment sections of networks.