Following one of my postings on the BBC, Danny Hershtal argued on Bnai Akiva's Blog that the deeper issue regarding media objectivity today is that papers and tv stations have dropped all pretense of having any.
He gets some backup today from a column in the Wall Street Journal, which argues that newspapers were openly partisan until the late nineteenth century when they started claiming independence of political parties in order to expand their readership. (I assume here he means in their actual reportage; most papers never gave up on their openly partisan editorial lines.) The columnist, Alan Murray, speculates that the return to partisanship today is not caused by more powerful owners, but is consumer-driven: "Consumers have more choices than ever before. It's those consumers who are choosing news sources that support their own biases."
This still doesn't answer the question of why the news outlets started admitting their bias and dropped the 'objective' ideal. I would posit, instead, that it's simply a sign of our post-modern culture, which discounts the notion of absolute 'truth' and which celebrates relativism. (And yes, I realize the irony, that each one of these outlets claims to be telling the 'truth'.) From there to a range of news sources openly admitting their bias is a short step.
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