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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

I can remember seeing Walter Cronkite on a PBS panel discussion warning America that this would be the end result of the deregulation of media ownership.

If a small number of people are allowed to own the vast majority of media outlets, those media outlets are no longer going to represent the interests of the public at large.

Back when all television/radio was broadcast over the air, there used to be this quaint concept of broadcasters having to prove that they serve "the public interest" to receive and retain an FCC license to use the public airwaves.

https://www.benton.org/public_interest_obligations_of_dtv_br...

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I dunno. I suspect that the news was just as partisan and biased back then, but the public was less able to independently verify news reports.

Of course the news has always been partisan. They were just honest about it in the past. Look how many newspapers have Democrat or some variation of Republican in their masthead. The real scandal is the recent fiction that journalists are unbiased.

There was a time when journalism was seen as an expense in the public interest and not as a partisan entertainment profit center / propaganda outlet.

Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.

> Stations that did run an editorial with a given partisan viewpoint were even required, by law, to allow an opposing view to be aired in response.

Sure, but the Overton window was quite slim. Many things were simply never discussed. Homosexuality, interracial romance, adultery of politicians, as just a few examples.

The "alternative perspective" gave the illusion of a full airing of views, but it simply wasn't so.

Early SNL (1970s) turned this into a bit on the news segment, with Chevy Chase introducing someone to respond to some (non-existent) editorial of theirs from a past program, to provide alternative viewpoints, as was their journalistic duty (which respondent invariably had mis-heard some word and so was responding, passionately, to entirely the wrong thing—that was the joke)

the public interest is dead, look at the sentiment here on HN. everyone has taken red pills from either Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan, or some influencer at the listener's socio-economic level, who propagandizes them about the Individual and how you cant trust anyone but other bros who also dont trust anyone.

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