Spin ... and the decline of the press

Spin ... pump it a few times and around and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. When I was a kid in the dark ages, before 1950, the ideal of journalism was to report the facts in the news sections and leave interpretations to the editorial pages. That pretty much held through the 1950's but with the advent of the VietNam war something changed.

The first change was the radical left took the position, a Communist Marxist position, that everything was political so that the ideal of unbiased news coverage was an illusion. You couldn't escape your biases so you might as well not try or more accurately you should slant the news to achieve your political objectives. That started mostly in the leftist press, but then started to capture the mainstream until by the 1980s or there abouts we had stories in which the vocabulary was chosen, the point of view of the news was chosen, the framing and selection of stories were chosen to advance an agenda. Most of the young people today cannot really remember a time when the news was written with the objective of being accurate and unbiased.

The result has been that no-one really trusts the news anymore. Everyone acknowledges that it is biased at least tacitly. So you can't trust what is said to be an accurate portrayal of the underlying facts. It seems to be getting worse, mostly by selection. All kinds of stories just don't get printed if they would have the effect of supporting the unfavored side. It seems no wonder that a news source like Fox, that claims to be fair and balanced, is doing so well in the ratings. Is it true though. None of the liberals obviously think so, but that may be just because Fox isn't repeating the Koolaid they're drinking from the New York Slimes (ur Times) and the Washington Toast (ur Post). It's all spin these days. So if you don't know the bias of the source you have no idea where the facts may actually fall, and even if you do know the bias, you can't be really sure what is true and what is slanted. My solution, or at least posture, is that you have to read both sides and assume that everyone is spinning to their own advantage. Somewhere in between the truth might actually be found. Well, maybe!