Francis Foster

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.

So sorry.

Let's say 1890 to 1900.

The muckrakers emerged just after that.

And they do some fabulous reporting on the evil things that happen in meatpacking plants and so on.

A little bit later, by 1920, Walter Lippmann writes a fantastic book called Public Opinion.

And they are criticizing the news as being too slavishly devoted to the audience, right?

To put it in British terms, too much like the Daily Mail and not enough like the New York Times, right?