Much has been written, both on the right and the left, about how dishonest the American press is, and most of it’s true, I’m sure. The question of tonight’s blog is “Was it ever any better?”
Sure, you had the ‘fairness doctrine’ and lots of smaller, more independent newspapers, but they still all lied about the Viet Nam war, right up till the end. The Smothers Brothers were removed from television because of the phrase “President Johnson is a big damn fool.”
Back in the 1950s, married couples in TV shows all slept in separate beds, nobody used bad words, and black people barely existed. Was the press really going to give the public the news about how J. Edgar Hoover loved dressing up in his mother’s clothes?
In 1898, William Randolph Hearst told a reporter “You give me the pictures, I’ll give you a war,” and he pretty much single-handedly got the U.S. in a war from Spain, in which we stole from them such properties as Cuba, and the Philippines.
They’ve been lying to us from the beginning of time.
One ray of hope for the future, as far as I’m concerned, is social media. Oh, you get plenty of lies there as well. But whatever anybody says, somebody else will say the opposite, so we have the beginning of a dialogue. That is a good thi9ng.
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