Truth is elusive

It is time for a review of media history.
Sharyl Attkinson, University of Florida grad and former CBS reporter, has written two best-selling books on liberal bias in the media.
She is right but it is not a new phenomenon.
In colonial America, when newspapers began to be printed, they usually were unabashedly partisan.
However, that was not necessarily bad because the remedy was easy.
Another partisan could easily begin publishing his own paper even in a small town and they could fight it out in the marketplace of ideas.
By the mid-20th century, however, publishing had become expensive. It wasn't always easy and large newspaper chains often drove out competition in smaller venues.
After the war, the government set up a special blue-ribbon commission to look at the media.
It found bias but did not recommend government controls.
What it did recommend was a clear line between opinion and news reporting and all the media pledged to follow that way of operating.
As usual, it was almost moot by the time the government examined the problem. Television was on the rise and news reporting with it, although at first TV shied away from opinion. Still, the competition helped keep newspapers more honest.
Inevitably, opinion began to creep in, and then cross the line into reporting.
By this century, as Attkinson and many others have noted, it was difficult to tell the difference between and editorial and a news story. Even readers often lost the ability to distinguish fact from opinion.
At the paper where I worked I often likened my job to the guy with the shovel who followed the elephants in a circus parade.
We wrote editorials to correct news stories that were little more than editorials. One reporter was fired as the result of one clearly biased story. (I would have fired the editor, not the reporter.)
But this century also brought in amateur journalism, via social media. Sloppy, undisciplined, where an error or an outright lie can be posted as easily as the truth. It isn't pretty, but it has turned out to be one way of keeping the liberal media accountable.
I don't know what the next innovation will be but it almost certainly will be better than government control as a means of getting to the truth.