Commenter MikeBoyScout writes:
I’m pretty sure all the Very Serious People in 1860 knew we’d always need and have slaves, and that racism was based upon fact.
I just went to an exhibition about Mark Twain yesterday and was struck by how much he sounded like a shrill modern leftie. He accepted evolution as established science, made fun of the idea of the Noah’s ark, wrote with bitter irony about the treatment of indigenous peoples in Australia (a lot of the exhibition was about his writing about his travels to Australia). The tone he took and some of the things he said would be eerily familiar to residents of the contemporary left blogosphere. (I’m sure he wrote all kinds of crazy, racist backwards stuff too, I’m not saying he was a saint.)
I realize this is an unabashedly wankerish, unanswerable question, but is public discourse now at all different from what it was back then? Or are things, at root, pretty much exactly the same?
stuckinred
Same as it ever was.
Chicken little’s all over the damn place!
twiffer
everything is the same, it’s just harder to avoid the noise nowadays. tv, internet, smartphones…getting off the grid is hard. and crazy is more entertaining, thus more profitable. so the crazy noise is what is broadcast.
i don’t think the tone is any different from the days of muck-raking yellow journalism.
Carnacki
Whenever I worry about all the elimination rhetoric from the right wingers I try to remember that people are no longer lynched in this country with frightening regularity as in the 1950s and 1960s. But then again, that’s setting the bar awfully low.
kdaug
The rhetoric’s the same, but the means to affect change (thinking nukes, here, or flying planes into buildings in foreign countries) is somewhat more disturbing than it was in Twain’s day.
Redshirt
More specialized now, I’d wager. But I bet everything is mostly the same – the same Grifters using religion as their tool, the same slick Pols promising everything and delivering nothing, same ignorant, scared people ready to gang up against whomever the “Other” of the day is.
Trouble is with current times: Everything’s faster, more extreme.
liberal
AFAICT Twain was a Georgist, so at least on economics he has most modern leftists beat.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
The thing that always cracks me up about Samuel Clemens is the Southerners who count him as a defender of the traditional institutional south and see Huckleberry Finn as a nostalgia novel rather than the satire it is. Sort of a 1800s Stephen Colbert, if you will.
What I’d actually be much more interested in is contemporary commentary on his work. Did people see him for the shrill leftist he was at the time? Was he subjected to a lot of hippie-punching?
Marc
I sure wish that I didn’t have anti-Strickland ads plastering the front page, along with smiling images of the vile John Kasich.
It’s too early to drive me to drinking like that.
Edit: and, yes, Twain took a lot of heat for his opposition to genocidal wars and his religious skepticism. A lot of his most biting attacks on religion were published posthumously (e.g. Letters from the Earth.)
Fergus Wooster
Twain helped found the Anti-Imperialist League after the Spanish-American War. The material he wrote after our occupation of Cuba and the Phillippines is positively scathing.
Definitely “shrill”, and definitely out of the realm of acceptable opinion at the time. Not a Serious Person. (The media being dominated by Hearst and Pulitzer, who would get along with Murdoch just fine.)
FlipYrWhig
Um, you probably know this, but there _were_ a lot of “middle ground” positions about slavery, like the whole debate about admitting slave states and free states, vs. “popular sovereignty,” Missouri Compromise, etc., because total emancipation seemed like a pipe dream, or might be catastrophic to the fragile nation. And John Brown was probably the original demonized radical on the issue.
FormerSwingVoter
I remember that the Birchers were calling JFK a socialist commie who conspired with our enemies, and they were distributing posters in Dallas of him with crosshairs over it a couple weeks before he was assassinated.
So, yeah. Same shit, different year.
TR
@Fergus Wooster:
Yep. If anyone here has never read Twain’s “The War Prayer,” they should go do so now.
Comrade Dread
DougJ
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, I know.
El Cid
Not to mention Twain’s late 19th / early 20th century’s courageous stand against imperialism in general (not just military, but political and cultural, too, i.e., missionaries) and in particular the native-slaughtering US war in the Philippines to prevent its independence and capture it as the Spanish were defeated. (A similar strategy was followed in Cuba, when the US entered to take Cuba just as Cuban forces had driven the Spanish to the point of retreat.)
lacp
@liberal: He was? Cool! Sure wish there were more of us around…..
Fergus Wooster
El Cid
@Fergus Wooster: Sorry, you were first, didn’t mean to repeat but I was trying to quickly look up Twain’s essays to quote, but it’s hard to find very succinct excerpts not needing of much editorial explanation.
Napoleon
@Redshirt:
Elmer Gantry
As to DougJ’s point that is one reason I have always loved Twain. He clearly saw through the BS of his day (particularly on race) and was a DFH years before the DFHs were born and became DFHs.
Observer
More accurately, people haven’t changed in over 2000 years.
Given a free press, public discourse is about the same.
You are always going to have the established few wanted to preserve their status and money by b.s’ing you and telling you up is down and down is up and using the tools of the state, the judiciary and war, to preserve their wealth.
You’re always going to have a few folks like Twain who see with clarity and draw a conclusion based on the logical extension of their philosophy even applying it to groups who are currently out of favor or foreign in the interest of fairness and justice.
And you’re always going to have people who tell the Twain’s of the world that even though they’re ostensibly on the same side, it isn’t a perfect world and Twain should accept whatever the politics of the moment is as being the best that can be done at the time and to stop complaining
Fergus Wooster
@El Cid: No worries at all – plenty of material to share here!
“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is a treasure-trove. IIRC, in the ensuing counterinsurgency war in the Phillippines, we wiped out about a third of the population.
@TR:
“The War Prayer” is awesome, and should be rolled out before every overseas adventure.
jl
i vote ‘pretty much the same’
I think Twain’s attitude towards the US’ ‘liberation’ of the Philippine nd subsequent occupation and war against native insurgents was what got him in the most trouble.
I read that once he had to apologize for saying in an interview that the US should change its flag to a black pirate flag with a skull and crossbones. People were asked whether they renounced, rejected, repudiated, refudiated Twain, and if they reviled him first thing every morning.
Twain would not be recognized as a progressive on some issues. He was of the Ben Franklin persuasion on helping the poor: best to drive them out of it rather than make their condition better through anything that looked like welfare. I read him saying that federal veteran’s benefits for Civil War veterans would be a bad idea. Sad as some of their plight was, and heartbreaking as some of the stories were, it would end up sapping the country’s vitality to support them, unless it was part of their contract when they signed on.
He was a hard money man too and very down on that adulterating the currency, as I remember. After he learned about the goings on in mining camps, I have wondered how he thought that way.
jl
@Fergus Wooster: Yep, that is the quote. I remember reading that he was pressured into giving an apology for that statement.
Edit: or maybe it was a similar statement he made off the cuff in an interview? What you quoted is from a piece he wrote? Which one? Was it published during his lifetime, or one of the ones that he kept to himself.
beltane
The parts I remember most about Huck Finn are the accurate representations of RealAmerica. I believe there is an episode where some bored men amuse themselves by killing dogs, over a century before anyone ever heard of Mike Huckabee’s dog killing son.
If only Sam Clemens had the opportunity to wax eloquent on the subject of Sarah from Alaska.
Hawes
Probably very much the same. Democrats and Republicans had their own newspapers and their own pubs. You even had Preston Brooks caning Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate and
teabaggersSouth Carolinians sending him new canes.Political discourse lacked the penetration and saturation it has now, but it was also part of everyday life.
There were no pro sports teams back then, and politics was not only politics but blood sport.
And let’s not forget that the outcome of elections meant who got the prime seats at the gravy train.
Violence was fairly common on voting day.
As much as we think things have gone down hill, progress does happen.
Demz Taters
Mark Twain himself knew that all of his ideas were more than the country could handle and stipulated that his uncensored autobiography be withheld for a century after his death. That just so happens to be this year, with the first volume due to come out this month.
Derelict Dog
Don’t let the Texas School Board find out, or he will be headed the way of Thomas Jefferson…
jl
From the Wikipedia entry on To the Person Sitting in Darkness:
“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is an essay by American humorist Mark Twain published in the North American Review in February 1901.
I guess Twain decided to unapologize after the interview flap.
Ann B. Nonymous
Google the 1860s humor of “Petroleum V. Nasby”. SSDD.
Mark S.
I wonder in a hundred years how our torture apologists will look. Not real good, I imagine.
liberal
@lacp:
Yeah, just use teh google.
It’s definitely appropos now, because with all this talk about the housing bubble, there’s precious little talk about how it was actually a land bubble, or why the economics of land lends itself to bubbles in the first place.
MikeBoyScout
@ DougJ,
I don’t want to wank, and certainly was not hoping you would wank as a result of my comment…. :-)
At root public discourse is a lot like it was back then. The balance of power lies in the extremes, and neither side will listen to the other.
Furthermore, like the lead up to the civil war, the WRONG side today refuses to examine its opinions and beliefs.
My fear, and the reason for my snarky comment, is that while I think such episodes in our country’s history are rare, it is a valid comparison to make today.
I think your choice of comparing Samuel Clemens to the professional left wing bloggers of the current time is an excellent comparison.
Now, let’s get back to less wanking and find something good to celebrate. Lord knows we need it.
jl
@liberal: never read anything that he was Henry George man. You have a reference on that? I would be interested in reading it.
I guess you can be progressive in some ways, by today’s standards, and conservative in others.
Suffern Ace
@Observer: You left out piffle. Given a free press, eventually the majority of things written won’t resemble any of your three categories and might be best classified as self-congratulatory piffle.
FlipYrWhig
I’ve done a bunch of research into early 18th-century British political discourse as “background” for other projects. It’s not all that different: they call each other tools of foreign governments, complain about tax policy and investment bubbles, agitate for war to show strength or against it to stay disentangled from overseas nonsense, decry how the other side is bent on introducing tyranny into a state based on individual liberty, the whole kit and caboodle. When it got too heated, like in the 1730s, there were even people who would wank about the desirability of bipartisanship and putting the national interest ahead of factional concerns or personal enrichment. The difference is that they used to be worried about Catholics and Scots, and now we’re worried about Muslims and Mexicans.
Shallow Sage
@Observer: I’ve been saying it for months. People NEVER change.
Lirpa
I believe that the American people have always relished holding on to crazy ideas. And I think that we have been happy to hold on to ugly ideas much longer than we should.
I have to think that today’s total disregard for provable truth is a different animal from the past. I am not talking about scientific concepts that people resist, such as the dangers of global warming, because I think that science has always been resisted by a portion of Americans. I also think that most Americans are too lazy or indifferent to actually hunt out facts on scientific issues for fear they won’t understand it.
What I think is different is the Palin phenom., where the day the Branchflower report comes out stating that she acted unethically with regard to Wooten, that same day she makes an announcement that she has been completely cleared of all ethics charges via the Branchflower report. She, and those like her, proudly proclaim the sky is pink and has always been pink and there is a portion of the public that is glad to believe the exact opposite of fact but there is even a portion of the media that considers it partisan to point out that the point is not, in fact, pink nor has it ever been. That portion of the public, who proudly hang on to counterfactuals, that probably hasn’t changed. What I think must have changed is the media impulse to treat the “sky is pink”ers as a legitimate take on the issue of sky color. This only increases the number of people who hear someone else talking about how the sky is pink and think, “if I keep hearing it all over the news, the sky must be pink, or at least it could be pink.”
Media have never been complete truth tellers. People have always held ideas that don’t stand up to inspection. But we couldn’t have come this far as a country if we had always acted as if actual right and wrong don’t matter. That is what scares me for our future. You can’t tackle problems with no agreement as to the very basics. Healthcare costs are a problem in this country – no doubt as to the facts on that one – but we can’t fix anything about it when one group, the loudest, howls that the rising costs, decreasing coverage and outright cheating by insurance companies simply aren’t happening.
FlipYrWhig
@Lirpa:
I think what happened is that the idea that the news is supposed to make money–itself a fairly new phenomenon–has led to a hypersensitivity to complaints. And no one does hypersensitive, threatening complaints like the right. So news organizations fear hitting the tripwire that leads to some kind of screeching rightie hissy fit, and they have thus instituted a culture where you cross the righties at your own risk. Fairness becomes detachment. Accurate retelling of abhorrent statements becomes a job well done, while looking into the truth of those statements becomes whacking the hornet’s nest.
This is just the Eric Alterman “working the refs” theory, I realize, but I think it’s a sensible one.
Earl
SSDD
mclaren
@Carnacki:
Actually the heyday of lynching was from the 1890s to the 1920s. The 1920s represented the apex of Klan popularity: there’s a stunning photograph of tens of thousands of Klansmen in full robes marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House that dates from the late 1920s.
During this period, trains were actually chartered by people specifically for the purpose of travelling to pre-arranged lynchings. Postcards of the lynchings were made and sold, and you could even buy souvenir body parts of the lynching victim.
By the 1950s, lynching fever had settled down quite a bit from its high point in the 1890s-1920s.
And, no, Clemens didn’t right “all kinds of racist stuff.” He was remarkably ahead of his time in that regard. And yes, nothing significant has changed in political discourse. Today’s Republican Party would fit right in during the 1880s, talking about the virtues of deregulation, the destructive anti-business inadvisability of ending child labor, the fatal folly of giving women the right to vote, etc. Just change “gay rights” for “women’s rights” and “ending corporate welfare” for “ending child labor.”
Elia
In general, I assume things are in essence the same as they’ve always been except Past Dwellers didn’t have Twitter.
ronin122
@Carnacki: Keep in mind though, lynching nowadays isn’t used much for the negroes (probably ‘cuz they gots guns now) but mostly for them faggots. Cracked down yes, but they’re fighting for their god-given right to beat a queer.
/bigot
I’d say the discourse itself has changed little outside of evolving to new technologies, just the ability to act out on such sentiments
The Other Chuck
The difference is that there wasn’t a homogenized national press that was too concerned with staying in the good graces of the powerful on the cocktail circuit rather than with confronting them on issues.
The real fourth estate is ready to be drowned in the bathtub. And the dunking has started.
Southern Beale
…is public discourse now at all different from what it was back then?
No, it’s not. That was my thought when I went to the Lincoln In New York exhibition at the NY Historical Society last year. It was a revelatory experience.
We have gone through periods when the news media was more robust and took its charge more seriously. But we’ve also been through period where Yellow Journalism ruled … Someone tell me how difrerent “Remember The Maine!” is from David Broder’s column yesterday or Judith Miller’s “reporting” for the N.Y. Times.
We are in a Yellow Journalism time, and this is what fuels our negative discourse. And it’s paying off — handsomely. The record billions of dollars spent on these midterms is all going, by and large, to the news media.
This probably will get me in trouble but I’m never donating to another campaign again. All it does is feed this rigged media game. Country is divided, media gets rich. Where is the incentive for the media to dial back the rhetoric, not report on the crazy shit, not give Breitbart and Erickson big megaphones?
Xanthippas
I don’t know, but I bet the preoccupation with public discourse is relatively new.
Mnemosyne
The only thing I can think of that Twain was unequivocally wrong about was his hatred for Jane Austen’s work (though he didn’t have quite the same white-hot hatred for her that he did for James Fenimore Cooper).
Byfuglien (pronounced Bufflin)
DougJ, Please point me to the crazy, racist backwards writings of Mark Twain. I am not familiar with them. I know him mostly as one of the great moral voice of the turn of the century. My bad, I guess.
Carnacki
@mclaren:
I was thinking that people responsible or cheered the lynchings that were still occurring in the 1950s and 1960s are still around today. I suspect they rail about many of the same issues, but they don’t get to kill people without consequence any more.
Mnemosyne
@ronin122:
Still not quite as bad, though — the case that induced Twain to write his righteous rant “The United States of Lyncherdom” featured not only the murders of three men, but the lynchers also drove 30 families from their homes and out of the community.
Yes, it’s true — random murder and crippling injury is actually an improvement over what they did in the good ol’ days.
Sad_Dem
The sugary, white-suited Twain is an invention. The real Twain was a radical who wrote scathing indictments of racism, slavery, armed robbery, imperialism, and U.S. foreign policy. But I repeat myself.
wsn
Vastly different.
Hitler had yet to be born, so the “Lincoln = Hitler” posters were more of an attempt to link Lincoln to an unpopular immigrant group, as opposed to the contemporary use by upstanding citizens to express a nuanced critique of the tax implications of health care law or traitorous foreign nationals (who have yet to be garroted for reasons passing understanding) that are not onboard (yet…) with torture and unlimited imprisonment.
QED.
DougJ
@Byfuglien (pronounced Bufflin):
That was reflexive, I didn’t want the thread to turn into “Mark Twain said crazy shit X”.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Lirpa: I was about to write something similar, Lirpa. I can excuse the primitive shit from back then because things were a lot more … primitive.
But you know that old expression about “If I knew then what I knew now, I’d have behaved differently?” We DO know a lot more now about virtually everything, and we’ve had 150 years of experience to boot. That’s what makes it harder to take today than (I presume) it was to take back in the day.
Maybe the thing that hasn’t changed, and which won’t, is that there’s always going to be a certain percentage of people who don’t want to learn or know jack shit. THAT’S what’s frustrating.
sven
@mclaren: The postcards of lynchings which you linked to here are just shattering. I can’t help but feel that (northern, white) Americans don’t really appreciate how widespread and accepted this violence was. I found the images filled with crowds simply chilling. Picture #27 where people are just grinning and pointing, man.
Winston Smith
He really didn’t.
I’m not saying he was a saint either, but you are falling into the “both sides are as bad” trap. Good sense and good will permeate his work.
lacp
@Byfuglien (pronounced Bufflin): Some of his writing about Native Americans (I like the Canadian designation of First Nations better, but no one’s asking me) could readily be construed as racist. It’s more likely that it’s truly over-the-top satire, but it’s hard to tell.
Splitting Image
If you want to really get depressed, try reading through a collection of Aristophanes. The theme that runs through the majority of his plays is the fact that the chief promoters of the war against Sparta were the businessmen in Athens who were benefiting financially from it.
He did a great scene in The Wasps where two family dogs are fighting a court case over which one of them ate the family’s store of cheese. The first thing the accusing dog brings up against the defendant is the fact that he’s not a native-born Athenian. Plus there is a scene in The Acharnians where he shows a man from Megara (one of the weaker Spartan allies and the one the Athenians liked to use as a punching bag) selling his daughters to an Athenian merchant in exchange for goods that Megara used to export to Athens.
It’s almost frightening that his plays are over 2400 years old.
stickler
Well, yes, Twain was pretty damned shrill, especially after the US took the Philippines (referenced above). Here’s his “Battle Hymn of the Republic (brought down to date)”, from that episode:
“Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps—
His night is marching on.
I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!”
We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her retreat;*
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!
In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder ditch,
With a longing in his bosom—and for others’ goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich—
Our god is marching on.
* NOTE: In Manila the Government has placed a certain industry under the protection of our flag. (M.T.)”
______________________
Heh. When he was in high dudgeon that man could surely write.
(edit: God damned blockquote mess.)
J
@Fergus Wooster: Many thanks for that bracing quotation. Is this the difference between now and then–and I’d love to be wrong about this–that when things were terrible in the past, there were courageous and highly public voices raised against them. Now who among the great and the good or enjoying any degree of public prominence (apart perhaps from Paul Krugman) was willing to say what a monstrous crime the war in Iraq was, to mention only one example.
colleeniem
@Mnemosyne: I’m glad you said that. In my opinion (and equal to his bad business sense) that his worst fault was this quote against Jane Austen. Oh well, I can have two literary heroes who don’t like each other.
Shade Tail
DougJ:
If anything is different today, it’s the efficient echo-chamber everything is now wrapped in. Between TV and the internet, you can now have near-instantaneous exposure and reaction to anything you say and write by, potentially, millions of people. Way back then, those folks had to get access to books and newspapers, or go to the scene in person, which was slower and less dazzling.
It’s the main reason why, for example, the extremist right wingers are so prominent now, when as recently as 30 or 40 years ago even their own party consigned them to the fringe. They’ve always been around, but now they’re getting so much more exposure than before, and much faster than before.
dopey-o
coming from clemens’ home state and read most of his work, you will forgive me if i hold him to be a minor american saint. i know people who’ve named sons after him….
considering the rampant, blithe racism of his day, his portrayal of Jim as a reasonable human being was radical. As was his notion that black and white americans, if left to themselves, could accommodate one another, but for the perverse pressures of society. Huck and Jim on their raft in the mississippi managed to treat each other as equals, as long as they didn’t touch land.
LosGatosCA
And, no, Clemens didn’t right “all kinds of racist stuff.” He was remarkably ahead of his time in that regard.
Exactly correct. Check out his connection to Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice.
He paid for Warner T. McGuinn’s board at Yale’s law school in 1887.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964136,00.html
Matthew
@J: I’d tend to agree that this is the major difference between now and then even though, as noted above, the national character has remained substantially the same. But it’s more a structural issue than a lack of courage. The factors are pretty clear: a quasi-monopoly on the main means of distribution (television) coupled with the relatively recent monetization of TV news. I don’t think you’re going to see someone like a Mark Twain in the current system, and if you do it will be a mistake on the part of whoever gives him/her the platform in the first place.
I don’t even think the essential failing in our mainstream media is a lack of courage so much as a lack of depth or moral seriousness. Put another way, it’s not that they would be afraid to say the things that Twain said, so much as those thoughts would never enter their heads in the first place. That’s how they land the job: corporate news media self-selects for those who will say the right things without having to be looked after, which mostly means the very stupid. Christ, anyone with two cents worth of brains or standards would be unable to go on the air and talk about “Firefighter Layoffs: No Money for Heroes” or anything about Chandra Levy (in 2010!) — the last two things I saw when I was dumb enough to tune in to CNN.
This is already longer than I wanted it to be, so I’ll try to be brief and say that the closest thing to an answer is what we’re doing now. Hopefully enough little voices put together will be enough to drown the big ones out to some extent. I also think there’s room for a new style of communication, something more appropriate to this medium. Especially in matters of politics, it seems like people on the internet treat each other largely as objects of class x — something to react to, positively or negatively. Really, we’re still acting based on images that are fed to us, because we’re still unused to being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime. I think it’s at least possible that that will change, especially if/when internet access becomes as ubiquitous as television.
Well…not brief, then. But hopefully useful in some way.
Common Sense
Twain and Tom Paine were both bloggers before there was a medium for them.
LosGatosCA
That’s why the listeners to those Burkean bells hate them so much.
rickstersherpa
I don’ t know how many of you have reread Twain since school. One of the reasons I don’t read modern fiction much is that the 19th century stuff is just so good. One of the many artful things about Huckleberry Finn is how Twain showed through Huck the power of religion to endorse and bless evil in a community. Huck sincerely believes he is damning his soul to Hell for all eternity because he is helping Jim escape. He knows his whole white community in St. Peterburg (Hannibal) Missouri would damn him for it. But his human connection and love for Jim compels him to do it. How many of us would be so brave today? For shorter reads, I suggest “Puddin’head Wilson” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.”
For those who have not read it, and just know it from the film versions that Hollywood has put out, you will be very surprised by “A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” which is as actually a piece of science fiction (time travel) and turns at the end, after lots of humor and satire, to be what I think is the most tragic and grim of Twain’s books, with a prophetic view of the technological carnage that was to come in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Cyrus
@FlipYrWhig:
I agree with you about the main problem (hypersensitivity to complaints, which these days leads to deference to right-wing nuts), but I think you’ve got the cause way off. For one thing, the idea that the news is supposed to make money is not a new idea at all; news media has been a for-profit industry since literacy became widespread. It hasn’t always been big business, with multimillionaires owning multiple media outlets in multiple cities, but (a) nor have many industries that now are, and (b) even that is more than a century old. (Citizen Kaine, for example, is pretty closely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. Many sins blacken his soul; among the worst of them are fomenting the Spanish-American War to sell newspapers, getting marijuana criminalized to prevent hemp from replacing wood pulp in paper and thereby shore up his timber business, and supporting the Krazy Kat comic when no one else would.) My understanding is that once upon a time media outlets were more or less open about their biases and used them as selling points – pandering to markets instead of trying to create opinions, maybe, or pushing narratives that appeal to the prejudices of certain target markets, stuff like that.
The relatively recent thing – within my parents’ lifetimes – that probably did cause hypersensitivity is the idea that the news media should be objective and bipartisan, which I think came with the rise of broadcast TV. Back when there were only four TV networks in the whole country, they had to be neutral (or try to be) (or look like they tried) or else it would look like a tight oligarchy (or make the existing oligarchy obvious), and government policy mandated that status quo. But in the 1980s government policy changed (guess why), and mass media has been in steady decline ever since.
LC
@Cyrus
I always thought the rise of the cult of objectivity was the rise of the AP and wire services. If you are going to sell wire service stories out to all the papers, you need it to be neutral.