[TheseDays888]

> What is wrong with newspapers nowadays? It seems the press decides someone's "fair game" and they just engage in the most blatant character assassination.

You're peering through time with rose-colored glasses.

American history is littered with instances using the press to smear and undermine the oppositions, whoever it may be.

The Founding Fathers, a number of them with close ties or financial stakes in printing press businesses, used it regularly to peddle an agenda.

Appearance and opinion have long mattered. Because they are really the only things we have on which to judge. Everyone has their own personal view and influencing that is the goal. Not truth. Never in the history of the nation has actual truth-seeking been the goal of the powers that be in politics or media.

Ideas like we're now in a "post-truth" world are bizarre. It's nearly a truism of the species to use a pedestal to smear enemies and endear to us our fans.