Old School

I think it's kinda funny when people wring their hands about cable news, how partisan it is, how people can be fed only information and opinion they agree with and how people don't even agree on the same set of facts anymore.
My thing about this is that it's nothing new, it's something very old.
Cable news, talk radio, the political parts of the Internet are mimicking what print journalism has always been.
A century ago there were newsstands in major cities where you could get newspapers in Italian, German, Yiddish, Russian. Anarchist papers in several languages, Communist, Socialist papers, Trotskyite papers when Trotsky left the Soviet Union, Fascist papers, Catholic papers, black papers, etc, etc...
Thomas Jefferson's Republican party (no relation to the one that started in the 1850s) had sympathetic newspapers. There were Federalist newspapers, eventually Democrat, Whig and Know Nothing parties had papers.
Now establishment liberals have Daily Kos, those further to the left have Fire Dog Lake and many others in between.
On television there is Fox "News" Channel, a right wing propaganda project with it's own political party.
Keith Olbermann molded MSNBC into a news outlet for liberals sick of just how right wing the "liberal media" had become, they Olbermann helped to launch Al Gore's Current TV as a less-establishment liberal outlet. (Olbermann then went off the deep end and has been replaced by Cenk Uyger of the Internet podcast The Young Turks).
The point is, yes we're getting mutually exclusive takes on the facts but that's no different than when our elected representatives wore powdered wigs.
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