I have a few feet away from me a newspaper from 1943 (the Wichita Kansas Sunday Beacon). I recognize that all stories have slant, but the older publications lack the breathless emotional manipulation that seems to pervade every news outlet nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
And that's just that one term. Before that, wealthy people literally made newspapers to try to push their own points of view onto the public. Heck, the USA was arguably founded on propaganda newspapers. They certainly weren't regularly fair and objective representations of truth, and rarely even tried to be.