Was the tyrant someone like Boss Tweed or another similar nabob in the Tammany Hall organization? Or someone more recent, like Jimmy Walker?
It's hard for me to believe that Harvey Weinstein escaped media scrutiny for so long because nobody was able to break the story. Seems now like every woman in Hollywood knew about his activities. I think it was more likely the case that nobody wanted, or dared, to break the story.
It's a good point that it can be easier to adopt a cynical attitude rather than to try to separate fact from fiction in every "news" story. But the journalism community's continuous self-congratulation--along the lines of, "If we're not allowed to tell the truth, who will?"--makes it even easier than it should be.
On my point about mediots, I'm not referring to disbelieving newsreader A when he/she says that the governor said X even after I've seen video (not deceptively edited, which does happen at times) of the governor saying X. I was thinking more of an opinion-giver who plays fast and loose with the facts, and with the interpretation of those facts.
But there are also a lot of straight-news people who are just incompetent at their jobs, who just don't get the story right. I've mentioned this before, but I seldom see TV coverage of the military, or print coverage of the military outside of military journals, that doesn't contain significant errors of facts or of comprehension of the significance of those facts.
I am also quite sure that there is a widespread bias in the news media which perhaps wouldn't be so bad except that it's nearly all in one direction. Except for talk radio, which is biased nearly all in the other direction, making all of it tiresome and more or less easy to disbelieve.
I know that among professional journalists there is something approaching reverence for the "golden age" of TV journalism--the 1960s. But I was there for that, and I don't think it was golden. Gilded, perhaps. It was three commercial network news organizations (plus to an extent PBS news) reporting on the same stories from the same point of view. The bias wasn't as extreme as I think the bias is now, but it was even more one-sided than today's bias is.
Robert Moses, who was Tammeny Adjacent.
There's unfortunately a gap between able to break and knowing things. Like I'm sure there's some Oklahoma writers who know there are Sooners players getting paid. But for some reason or another, it's not out there. In Weinstein's case, he leveraged a lot of power on a lot of victims. I'm sure there were at least a few who for some reason or another told their stories and didn't have them publicly out there (in some cases I'm sure with threats to the outlets themselves from Weinstein's lawyers). That's a failure, but likely not one of wanting it covered up.
Media self congratulation is generally bad. You can believe you're chasing truth while not getting all lathered up about it. There we agree.
I'd also agree we focus more on the opinion givers because we simply lack the bandwidth to process everything. Likewise, it's a weird job because of how generalist it often is. I wouldn't disagree that a journalist might struggle with the finer details of military command or medicine or anything else. They talk to experts. They try to synthesize. It's often not quite what the experts would want. At times experts get good at speaking for themselves, but also can be unreliable narrators in their own situations (this is fascinating when it comes to sports. Like the minutia of football is just crazy, and we gloss over 99 percent of it all the time, and often coaches or players are uninterested in showing us what's happening)
In the argument of bias, I don't know that I'd argue it isn't there in some form or fashion, but I do think it's overstated to a massive degree. Some of this goes back to bandwidth. Most of news is deeply boring. If you live in a town with a TV station and a newspaper, you've got at minimum 50-60 stories a day locally, probably more. And the vast, vast majority of those are told with little of what we might see as out-and-out bias. Maybe subtle bias (this is interestingly true in terms pro-police stuff), letting a school superintendent say what's happening without a reliable counterbalance, that stuff. But we can't absorb all those stories. The ones that stand out are more vivid, especially the ones that trigger or offend. It's kind of like when you watch a TV sports broadcast. They talk for like 2.5 hours. And most people remember the 2-3 things that annoyed them.
(I also agree the "golden age" is overrated. It was an era when people were more trusting. It was to a degree smaller and less noisy, but it wasn't that much more pure)
