By the end of the decade I’d begun to follow the news. We got the San Francisco Chronicle delivered every day. Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated came once a week. And the news came every day on all three networks.
Dad and Mom kept up with the news in the paper and on the television. Dad read the business pages and sports pages, Mom read the main news. They caught the nightly news on TV often. We all read Time Magazine every week. Dad, Chip, Jay and I read Sports Illustrated too.
Dad, Chip, and even Jay and I also read the newspaper every day, starting of course with the sports pages. The Chronicle used to publish the sports section as a separate section, on green paper. So it was the “sporting green.”
News was news. The Chronicle wasn’t right or left. Nobody thought of newspapers as right of left, Democratic or Republican. It was the news. The television news, which came from three networks, wasn’t right or left. It was what was happening. We watched Walter Cronkite on CBS and Huntley-Brinkley on NBC.
Back then, public opinion fought over facts. We all watched the network news on the three main networks, and we read the local newspaper, and we chose Time or Newsweek. Facts like the real death toll and real lack of progress turned public opinion over the Vietnam War. Video images of beatings and brutality changed public opinion over the Civil Rights movement.
In the background, the main news media had to stay in the center to keep their audience. There was no money in fringes. So we had Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather looking for facts, jumping from right to left or Republican to Democrat as the facts came up. Truth, as evaluated by evidence, was good business. It got the largest audiences.
Furthermore, the television networks were subject to the equal time rule in broadcast media, so whatever time they gave to one candidate or party had to be matched by equal time for the other. That rule kept them in the center, looking out from the middle at the extremes. The appearance of impartiality was critical. They reported facts, mostly. When they published opinion it was set aside and labeled as opinion.
News as propaganda, news as partisan, news as political football never occurred to any of us back then. Journalists reported the news. Opinion appeared in editorial pages and some television commentary, but always as opinion, not news.
As I look back from decades later, what happened to news was disastrous. Cable news, especially, was disastrous.