This piece by Terry Mattingly is frustrating. He accurately describes the current atrocity of total unabashed bias in all media, but he’s wrong about the history.

Basically, the world’s most influential newspaper is moving away from the old free-speech liberalism of what historians call the “American model of the press,” with little public commentary about the consequences of this strategic move, other than the occasional blast of candor such as the Rutenberg essay about fighting Trump. The Gray Lady appears to be swinging back to an older European Model of the Press offering news carefully crafted to please a specific audience or, at the very least, to avoid offending it. These European-model newspapers were once defined by language, politics, economics, religion, and even race.

As I’ve been hammering forever, honestly defined newspapers WERE the American model before 1950. Every town over 2000 population had two papers, and larger cities had hundreds of papers. Each paper openly appealed to one political faction or one ethnic group or one social class or one religion.

In most cases religion and party collapsed into a binary division by caste. In the midwest, the upper caste was Episcopal and the lower caste was Baptist. In NYC, the upper caste was Jewish and the lower caste was Catholic. Before 1950, the upper caste was R and the lower caste was D.

From 1934 to 1984 radio and TV were unbiased because FCC censorship REQUIRED them to be unbiased. The Fairness Doctrine worked. After it was repealed, radio and TV instantly reverted to the newspaper model, but without honest labeling.

After WW2, newspapers noticed that the Fairness Doctrine made radio and TV more popular, so they PRETENDED to be fair. They removed the honest labels from their mastheads and continued serving the upper caste, which was switching from R to D at the same time. Now all media serve D, because D has all the power and money.

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Next day: watching bits of the congressional “investigation” of Twitter. This shows what happens when purely partisan media believes it’s “objective”. The demon zombies representing Twitter define “safety” and “health” and “protection” as “100% loyal service to DNC”. Slaughtering all Repooflicans is “safety”. Enriching and empowering all Democrats is “health”. The pre-1950 newspaper publishers weren’t stark raving mad. They publicly stated every day that their BRAND was D or R or Socialist or Populist. They weren’t “protecting” “health”, they were just serving customers who liked their BRAND. Coke vs Pepsi, D vs R.

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Semirelevant: Sammy is far more realistic than Twitter or Mattingly. In a discussion with Tiffany Fong, he explained why he used dark money for his Repooflican contributions but made his D contributions through proper channels. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons. It’s just that reporters freak the fuck out when you donate to Republicans.”