So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

People who hog the conversation and will only talk about themselves!

Those who don't like their news mixed with political slant would be well advised to steer very well clear of all newspapers published in the Era. I've read thousands of them and have never found even one that doesn't tell you what to think about the stories you're reading. Sometimes it's obvious -- the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers were very clearly pro-Fascist and anti-labor, PM was very clearly anti-Fascist and pro-labor. But even less obvious papers had a slant, almost always in the direction of the corporate/NAM/anti-labor line, and this slant colored every aspect of the news they printed and how they chose to cover it. The press critic George Seldes declared in 1940 that with the possible exception of the Christian Science Monitor and a few country weeklies, there were no honest newspapers in the United States, and I have to agree that he was right.

There has never been a time in the history of American journalism where such bias was not evident. It's inherent in our system of advertiser supported media.

LizzieMaine said:

Those who don't like their news mixed with political slant would be well advised to steer very well clear of all newspapers published in the Era. I've read thousands of them and have never found even one that doesn't tell you what to think about the stories you're reading. Sometimes it's obvious -- the Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers were very clearly pro-Fascist and anti-labor, PM was very clearly anti-Fascist and pro-labor. But even less obvious papers had a slant, almost always in the direction of the corporate/NAM/anti-labor line, and this slant colored every aspect of the news they printed and how they chose to cover it. The press critic George Seldes declared in 1940 that with the possible exception of the Christian Science Monitor and a few country weeklies, there were no honest newspapers in the United States, and I have to agree that he was right.

There has never been a time in the history of American journalism where such bias was not evident. It's inherent in our system of advertiser supported media.

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It's also inherent in both the reality of editing and human nature. It is incredibly hard to truly be unbiased in selecting news stories - which are the most important / which details drive the story / what context or narrative does it relate to / what historical-or-contempary examples do I bring in to compare it to? Everyone one of those decisions is fraught with bias considerations.

If we don't want our news to sound like "Dragnet," and if we do need some context to help with relevancy, then bias will be part of it. Once you start thinking about those decisions, you see the "little" biases everywhere. Is this story above or below the fold, did they reference this example that reflects well/poorly on this group or did they choose that example? And even before that - what story made it to the paper / website? How often is it followed up? Do we devote one, two, three articles to this event?

Even the most honest people trying not to be bias will fail in the daily grind of hundreds of those decisions needed to be made in real time. It's actually fun to see when a new news story hits how it is covered in various papers or websites. Do they scream out the headline? How is the headline slanted? Do they provide a lot of "context" that drives your thinking one way? Since I don't want this to be a political post at all, I won't call out any papers by name, but wait for the next big news event to hit and, then, go to two different papers which, in your opinion, have opposite biases and watch how they cover it.

In a day or two, it will be less obvious, but when it first hit, it can be really fun to see all the biases showing. And it doesn't matter, IMHO, if we have advertiser-supported media or not because, as always, someone has to pay the bills. If we nationalized the media, well then, I bet you'll find many pro-gov't and pro-gov't-supported biases creeping in (there are plenty of historical and current examples to support this argument). Do it through some third party funded system - somebody / group / ideology that is paying the bills will still have outsized influence with an agenda.

And then there is the chicken-and-the-egg argument. Is our media becoming more bias right now because that is what its audience demands or are we becoming a more bias (divided) society because our media foments that? Maybe it doesn't matter as - as FL shows - we aren't fooled by the biases in the media and know that to get a fuller picture one most read from many sources, apply logic and reason and keep searching for the truth or something close to it. I doubt - as Lizzie notes - that ever has and ever will come from one news source.

I think the biggest problem right now is the ongoing consolidation of media. In the Era, New York had the Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Herald-Tribune, the Journal-American, the World Telegram, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Worker, PM, the Bronx Home News, and the Brooklyn Eagle. All had their biases, but at least you had a variety of biases from which to select and compare, and this was the way it was in most cities. Now even the "two newspaper town" is a rarity, and even Internet journalism is in trouble.

LizzieMaine said:

I think the biggest problem right now is the ongoing consolidation of media. In the Era, New York had the Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Herald-Tribune, the Journal-American, the World Telegram, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Worker, PM, the Bronx Home News, and the Brooklyn Eagle. All had their biases, but at least you had a variety of biases from which to select and compare, and this was the way it was in most cities. Now even the "two newspaper town" is a rarity, and even Internet journalism is in trouble.

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I'm kinda hoping what we were talking about yesterday - how more news websites are charging now or charging more for subscriptions - will help reverse or, at least, stabilize this.

The "web should be free" meme crushed news services - hard to make money when so much of your revenue base was eroded and so much of your content was "borrowed" by aggregators so that you never even got "eyeball" credit many of the times your story was read.

Things have to be paid for by someone. Reporting on news is expensive and can't be done without money - as nice as it is to wish it would be "free."

My guess is they'll always be enough revenue for national reporting and, even, big city reporting, but the small, local papers have gotten destroyed. Their model was always a bit off kilter, but it worked, as "The Classifieds" basically subsidized everything else, but Craigs List, EBay, etc., ended that gravy train.

So far, there hasn't been a real-good replacement model that works to support local reporting identified. Again - free sounds good but is complete nonsense, every single thing cost money. It's just a matter of who pays; otherwise, we don't get to have it.

I agree that some kind of paid model is the only way forward -- but I don't think that even with that will we ever again have what we had as recently as the '90s. When I was a reporter, the doings of our local city council were covered by the Bangor and Portland daily papers, our local tri-weekly, two local weeklies, and two radio stations. All that coverage in a city of less than 8000 people. People knew what was going on, and the level of interest in local government was very very high. The interest fed the coverage and the coverage fed the interest.

But deregulation of the "public service" requirement killed the radio coverage, and budget cuts killed the newspaper coverage. Our tri-weekly folded, and came back as a weekly -- and that weekly, or to be specific, one reporter on that weekly, is the only regular source of coverage of the local political scene. He's a good reporter, but he's only one man, who is getting older, and when he's gone, I don't see anyone taking his place. It's a depressing thought.

Getting 3 feet of register tape for 3 items at the supermarket checkout.

ChrisB said:

Getting 3 feet of register tape for 3 items at the supermarket checkout.

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And 3 plastic bags.

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Worthless CVS pharmacy coupons for things you will never buy. Graciously included with your receipt.

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ChrisB said:

Getting 3 feet of register tape for 3 items at the supermarket checkout.

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1mach1 said:

Worthless CVS pharmacy coupons for things you will never buy. Graciously included with your receipt.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G930A using Tapatalk

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The average distance from thr Earth to the sun is the same as 8 CVS reciepts.

Bruce Wayne said:

The average distance from thr Earth to the sun is the same as 8 CVS reciepts.

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Hahaha. Precisely!

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LizzieMaine said:

New York had the Times...Now even the "two newspaper town" is a rarity, and even Internet journalism is in trouble.

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This morning-about 05.15am-I was able to lift one of only two New York Times off the stand with the Chicago Sun Times before ordering coffee.
I confess to a love affair with the Times, a still elegant paper filled with much more than editorial screed, but its distribution dwindle indicates
poor paper circulation which rhymes with profit. And loss. I pray the Times survives.
Chicago has the Tribune and Sun Times but the bygone days of Bulldog Drummond, Mike Royko, and Studs Terkel are long past.

ChrisB said:

Getting 3 feet of register tape for 3 items at the supermarket checkout.

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I could swear there are times when the receipt weighs more than what I bought.

I dearly loved reading Royko. For years I had a clipping of one of his favorite columns in my office, under the unforgettable headline "WAKE UP AMERICA AND STOP ACTING LIKE SUCH A BUNCH OF SAPS."

A lot of the distribution problems the Times faces in New England have to do with the fact that it's printed by the Boston Globe, which abandoned its old plant in Dorchester this past spring in favor of some new state of the art mess in Taunton. Unfortunately when they unpacked this new plant they must've accidentally thrown away the manual because there have been chronic printing and distribution problems ever since. The Globe, the Herald, the New England edition of the Times, and USA Today all come out of this plant, and nine times out of ten you won't find the specific paper you want when you go to any given newsstand. It's maddening, and it's been going on for six months now without any improvement. All they'll say about it is that there have been "software problems." Yeah, well, you never had that problem with hot metal.

LizzieMaine said:

I dearly loved reading Royko. For years I had a clipping of one of his favorite columns in my office, under the unforgettable headline "WAKE UP AMERICA AND STOP ACTING LIKE SUCH A BUNCH OF SAPS."

A lot of the distribution problems the Times faces in New England have to do with the fact that it's printed by the Boston Globe, which abandoned its old plant in Dorchester this past spring in favor of some new state of the art mess in Taunton...

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I met Royko when I was attending the University of Illinois-Chicago and he gave a talk to the veterans club. Mike was stationed in Korea at 'K-2"
when Ted Williams drove his shot-up plane onto the airstrip there. All the guys lined the airfield praying he'd make it. Ted Williams.
Royko's classic on Mayor Richard Daley, Boss rightfully earned the Pulitzer, but his daily column was always a must read.
___________

Word on the street here in Chicago is that the Times may be on the ropes,
which I dearly hope is not the case.

What the papers want is to stop printing altogether as that would be a monster cost save (if most readers and advertisers more to on-line), but they want to do it gradually so that they can soak as much revenue out of print (and not turn too many older readers off) before print finally goes away.

I read Royko and others like him, but don't believe we'll have guys like that again as the market is too fragmented. The upside of the web / social media is that we all get to find our niche favorites, but we do lose that "national" or even "big regional" voice / writer that we all talk about at the water cooler.

Fading Fast said:

What the papers want is to stop printing altogether as that would be a monster cost save (if most readers and advertisers more to on-line), but they want to do it gradually so that they can soak as much revenue out of print (and not turn too many older readers off) before print finally goes away.

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I readily zip the standard ten free articles off the Times' web site every month, love its Arts section and book/theatre reviews.
Ahh..I need to have the actual paper in my paws with a cup of coffee.

Harp said:

I met Royko when I was attending the University of Illinois-Chicago and he gave a talk to the veterans club. Mike was stationed in Korea at 'K-2" when Ted Williams drove his shot-up plane onto the airstrip there. All the guys lined the airfield praying he'd make it. Ted Williams.
Royko's classic on Mayor Richard Daley, Boss rightfully earned the Pulitzer, but his daily column was always a must read.

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One of my favorite Royko daily columns was the time (around 1976, if my memory serves me correctly) when he went off on Fr. Andrew Greeley for decreeing that he (Royko) was ".. crude enough to fit the stereotype of the Chicago Slav." Now, I always enjoyed reading both of their books and their newspaper columns, so I really didn't take sides in the fight... but it was a fun donnybrook to watch.

Zombie_61 said:

I could swear there are times when the receipt weighs more than what I bought.

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Have you ever opened a package and it's taken you forever to find your purchase? Makes you wonder if you are paying a carriage charge for packing. (Couriers charge by weight as well as by dimensions.)

ChiTownScion said:

One of my favorite Royko daily columns was the time (around 1976, if my memory serves me correctly) when he went off on Fr. Andrew Greeley for decreeing that he (Royko) was ".. crude enough to fit the stereotype of the Chicago Slav." Now, I always enjoyed reading both of their books and their newspaper columns, so I really didn't take sides in the fight... but it was a fun donnybrook to watch.

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'Mike n' Andy' mill grist flew fast colorful lingo. Both characters in their own style, Royko the more deadly cuss,
but the padre stirred much controversy and was his own worst enemy.
Greeley lacked a sense of balance; too progressive for ecclesial mitre and devout pew, and too much gown for the town.