| "To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. general facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1] ------ His words may correspond to your own, but the fact that such views were generally widespread contradicts them. I think what has happened is modern times is not that the media becoming worse than ever, but rather that for some very brief window in time we actually had a media with integrity and ethics, even if completely serendipitously. So all we're doing is, seemingly like many things in modern society, is simply returning to how things were for nearly all of society's existence. [1] - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-5... |
I would like to request you to entertain the possibility that the media became so powerful and influencial for a brief period that they convinced everyone of that idea... the information revolution just helped break the facade by democratising access to information... because of which their model of story-telling which was based on large uninformed masses (or masses homogenously disinformed with biased story-telling) no longer worked.