Welcome to the Post-Progressive Era explains how modern journalistic practices of reporting only news that’s “fit to print” are a fairly recent development:
In the 18th and 19th century, the press was unabashedly partisan and ideological, on one side or the other. That is, everything that the Federalists did was great, everything that the Whigs did was terrible — or vice versa. To this day, there are still a few newspapers with names such as ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’ in their titles. And a few active bastions of this polarized and pugilistic era still survive: The Manchester Union-Leader runs front-page editorials; The New York Post never hesitates to let its opinions percolate through the whole paper.But for the most part, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, newspapers have operated according to different rules. This was the work of the Progressives, the bipartisan movement — including, as its great champions, presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — that remade America from 1890 to 1920. The Progressives wanted to clean up corruption and patronage, but that was just for openers.
The Progressives were, in fact, much more than reformers. They were more elitist and paternalistic than democratic; their goal was to use new tools, such as bureaucracy and regulation, to bring predictability and “efficiency” into society.
The American Medical Association, incorporated in 1897, was an emblematic Progressive institution; it sought to professionalize medical education and to improve medicine — and also, critics noted, to illegalize folk practitioners and alternative providers, such as chiropractors or midwives. Which is to say, the Progressives had a certain vision of the Great Society. And woe to those who disagreed.
The same Progressive ethos conquered journalism. The Columbia Journalism School, founded in 1912, was designed to bring the new science of professionalism and objectivity to the bloody-knuckled, as well as ink-stained, wretches of newspaperdom. The new idea was that journalists, educated and inculcated in the latest thinking, would seek out the truth and bestow it upon the masses, for the general betterment of all.
That was the pattern for the new century. Journalists, working from big and quasi-monopolistic newspapers, scanned the horizon for all the news that was “fit to print.” There was one huge catch in this media approach, of course — it was boring. In the 19th century, The Times of London earned the nickname, “The Thunderer,” for its lightning-like excoriations of British politicians; plenty of American papers, too, prided themselves on savaging their foes. But in the new Progressive era, such invective was seen as unprofessional. And so hot, populist, passionate copy was mostly consigned to a few columnists or, more often, exiled completely to the tabloid nether realm. So the news became, in a word, dull. Slightly left-of-center, of course, but still dull.
Later, the print-establishment was joined by, and eventually superseded by, television. But TV news, infected with Progressive thinking and further constrained by the Federal Communications Commission, was dull, too.
This paternalistic, hegemonic order — of trained and credentialed journalists, administering the news — survived into the early 90s.
Now we have Fox News.