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Most countries have partisan press - the UK obviously, but also France (Le Figaro vs Le Monde at the quality end), Germany (FAZ vs SZ) etc. America had partisan press for most of its history (Citizen Kane is about this), and does so now. The idea that there is one respectable paper per major city, and they all form an ideological monoculture such that you can talk about "the Press" as something that should eschew political bias, is what is weird and is driven by specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't think "there is no single newspaper and/or TV station which is generally accepted as impartial" makes a country less democratic.
It wasn't just 'specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century', there was a period of ideological homogenization that preceded and was bound up in a discussion about professional ethics which drew on reformism and progressivism in the first half of the 20th century. There's a reason the Press' efforts to portray itself as neutral in the '2nd half of the 20th century' worked: they made a genuine effort to follow the ethical standards set up in prior generations and that convinced a lot of people to buy what they were selling.
This is important because you're not just going up against the leftovers of a series of material causes, you're dealing with an ideology that has deeper roots in people's sense of social right and wrong. It's not just that people look back fondly on the period and want it back, it's that they agree with what was (at least partially) achieved in that period and want it back.
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There are some RW presses. But now you add in Google. Google puts a thumb on the scales by promoting traditional old news that are clearly LW (eg NYT, NBC, WaPo) whilst not promoting RW.
So the monopoly that Google has really puts a stranglehold on info sharing. Thank god for Elon Musk at least.
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That all seems basically correct to me. What you seem to have left out is that America in the 20th century developed a tradition of viewing the Press as the impartial, truth-oriented watchdogs of culture and society (to the point that journalists now feel comfortable calling it a "fact check" when they disagree with someone, or even simply disapprove of the framing of an issue). The Press has grown more partisan, but public perception hasn't caught up to that--even though most people understand that some news outlets are partisan hacks, their preferred sources are exempted. Gell Mann amnesia at an institutional level, as it were.
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It's fine if each paper has its own slant! But if they all have the same bias, you have a problem. And you have an even bigger problem if the universities that produce "professional" journalists on one side and the industry financing new paper on the other also have the same bias, so that correction becomes all but impossible. I don't think it's a coincidence that people retreat into completely independent, badly financed, broadly unreliable (but at least not reliably biased!) alternative ecosystems such as blogs and forums.
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