Francis Foster

Whereas in Germany and France, Spain and Italy, these were government entities more or less from the beginning.

and though they mimicked a lot of the freewheeling style of the english language news wires and they did collect information from around the world and frankly some of them have very good product deutsche welle argent france press but there's still especially the beginning in the in the telegraph era in the latter half of the 19th century those governments had a lot of control over what was presented it wasn't but in the speaking world it was more wide open

Not to say the government didn't censor troop movements and a handful of other things, but for the most part, it was pretty freewheeling.

It was pretty wide open.

All that's great.

By the end of the 19th century, we're gathering news from all over the world.

We're reporting it quickly.

Competition is improving things.

and we have something like uh an honest news system that's not to say there weren't political party papers because of course there were um you know to this day i think uh there is a uh the hartford uh you know it's not the hartford current there's a there's a newspaper in uh in connecticut named there's the whatever the name of the town is the republican there's the

Arkansas Democrat, right?

The political parties used to sponsor their own newspapers and decidedly their own point of view.

But they were still governed by independent competitors, and they knew their readers would be reading those too, so they couldn't go too far.

Competition, accountability,

And this idea that, yes, you can have your own individual idea of the truth, just like the medieval Protestant could have his own individual relationship with God, but you're in competition, so you've got to pay attention to the other people's idea of truth.

And so it isn't just your truth.

It has to be a shared, provable truth.

Then two things happen, and this is why we have such fights over news today.

One is a group of intellectuals decide, and we could loosely call them the progressives.

I'm not making a point about today's progressives.

This is what these people at this time called themselves.