Today it is not news reporting at all.
Here you are Charlie got this from a book called "What is Coming."
It has only gotten worse since then.
No Independent Press. Sometime in the 1890's
At a dinner recently given the Press in New York, a journalist was called upon to reply to the toast, "An Independent Press." Knowing we had no independent press among the powerful papers of the nation, he for a long time refused to reply, but being insisted on to do so, said:
"There is no such thing in America, as an independent press, unless it is out in the country towns. You are all slaves. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you express it you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 a week for keeping honest opinions out of the papers I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job. The business of a leading journalists is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to nullify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for daily bread, or for what is the same thing, his salary. You know this and I know it and what foolery to be toasting an "Independent Press." We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks. They pull the siring and we dance. Our time, our talent, our possibilities are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
What is Coming
Lyman E. Stowe 1896
