[Spellman]

Go back even further and pretty much every news source was a propaganda machine. Most of the major "trusted" new sources today started primarily in yellow journalism and political attack ads. Pulitzer was not a particularly nice man. Neither was Hearst.

It was a brief modern period when news sources decided to take themselves seriously and rise up ethically and appear "unbiased" to the public. It made the landscape more consolidated and monolithic, but it also drove sources to present relatively whole stories with what limited bandwidth they had to the largest population possible.

That being said, at the same time, radio hosts quite willingly went into the base-pandering and echo chambers. Conservative Talk Radio didn't crop up in the 2000s. They arrived after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine from the FCC in 1987.

TV and print news only later realized if you insert just enough bias to make their viewers feel comfortable and to differentiate from their peers, they could make a WHOLE lot more money. And with the creation of a lot more time to sell news via 24hr channels and the Internet, you had to room to add in fluff, opinion, and other material.