I’m not the only FReeper who’s been around the block a few times . . . I was 2 yo when "the Japs" - as they were scornfully referred to during the war - bombed Pear Harbor. Altho we knew back then that “loose lips sink ships,” and journalism couldn’t tell us the whole story while the war was going on, some of that censorship was conducted not to protect “our boys” but to protect the government (read, FDR) from terrible PR. The shining example being the devastating scale of the losses to US shipping immediately after Hitler’s declaration of war a week after Pearl Harbor, and the corresponding rate of destruction of the attacking U-boats (which was zero). None of which was a secret to Hitler.Speaking of the declaration of war by Hitler, nothing was said at the time but the causus belli Hitler used as justification in his declaration was absolutely true. That is, the Lend Lease Act was not the act of a neutral but of a ”neutral” on the side of Britain and the USSR. True neutrals don’t supply war materiel to one side while harassing the other. Truths can be disappeared in plain sight when they are uncomfortable, and that certainly was the case in this context.
The long and short of it is that I grew up in thrall to “what was going on” as journalism reported it. It was only in the context of the Carter (mal)Administration that I even fully accepted the fact of “bias in the media.” But the issue before the house is why journalism as a whole is joined at the hip with the Democratic (as if) Party. It took decades (blush) for me to crack the code, but I think I have a good model of it. Which, necessarily, goes back a long way.
First, the newspapers of the founding era made little secret of the fact that their core mission was to express the opinions of their printers. Those printers were small, the papers were single page affairs (exclusively, I think), and they operated on relatively long deadlines - in some cases, no deadline at all, only “when I’m good and ready to go to press.” Claims of objectivity were made, but not taken seriously.
Second, Samuel Morse demonstrated his Baltimore-to-Washington telegraph line in 1844, and it was a revelation. Telegraph lines spread rapidly and widely in the North (but, due to the conservative/reactionary nature of the South at the time, not so much elsewhere). The New York Associated Press was formed in 1848, and soon “New York” was dropped from the name. The AP doesn’t have customers, it has members - newspapers pay (expensive) membership fees and they contribute stories to “the wire.”
Since they were expressing the opinions of their printers, they wanted to contribute stories to “the wire.” But a not-so-funny thing happened on the occasion of the assassination of President Lincoln. The first story coming out of Washington afterward “buried the lede,” first reporting other local affairs and only relatively incidentally mentioned at the end of the piece that the president had been shot in the head. This was definitely a scandal in journalism circles, and the AP Stylebook is the result. The effect of any and all wire services is to homogenize journalism.
The potential of the AP to disseminate propaganda nationwide was questioned as early as the 1870s, but the AP responded that its material mostly came from its members, and (as noted above) newspapers had the reputation of not agreeing with each other on anything. Meanwhile the Stylebook was gradually obliterating that formerly indisputable fact.
Yes, but why is the resulting homogeneous journalism anti conservative? That is because journalism is slanted, for commercial reasons, towards bad news. Bad news attracts the attention of an audience, and bad news is more common than good news. The construction of a house takes time, and over the course of time that construction constitutes no dramatic news. But let that house burn down . . .
“No news is good news” because good news “isn’t news.” Journalism is criticism implicitly, and it criticizes everyone from the perspective that any bad news might have been prevented by the government. From, that is, the left.
It is conventional to refer to the problem as “bias in the media,” but I prefer to simply refer to the leftist perspective of journalism. Certainly fiction can and does have political ramification, but fiction after all does not explicitly claim to be factual. I see no possible gain in attempting to censor fiction in any way.
Purveyors of tendentiously misleading “nonfiction” can be sued for libel. And the only genre of “nonfiction” which is politically potent is journalism. Wire service journalism.