Reply #16: Up into the 30s, the media (read, newspapers) regularly were [View All]

[RaleighNCDUer]

extremely partisan -- but there was always an opposition. If the Times was stridently republican, the News was virulently democrat. That also made for a free press, prior to the consolidation of newspaper empires, like Hearst. Even as late at the seventies most towns of any decent size, even as small as 20 - 30,000, had at least two oppositional papers. That's where the free press movement began, in reaction to the secondary papers folding, or being bought out by the major paper.

I believe that the 70s and Watergate were the last gasp of the free press in America. Look at the difference between the way Watergate was covered and the way Iran/Contra was covered just ten years later. The right learned the dangers of a free press in '74, and have been doing everything they can to eliminate it ever since.