[Hong Wu]

https://newrepublic.com/article/146895/learning-trust

In January, the Knight Foundation issued a new report on “trust, media, and democracy.” It was a long document—71 pages, with eight headings atop 28 bullet points in the “Key Findings” section alone—and took a detailed look at why modern news organizations struggle to “fulfill their democratic responsibilities of informing the public and holding government leaders accountable.” The report identified many contributing factors, but none more than the perception among the public that the nation’s news organizations weren’t being objective. According to a Gallup-Knight survey conducted for the report, fewer than half of all Americans could think of a news source that “reports the news objectively.” Political partisanship had, apparently, so eroded trust that respondents to a “media trust scale” rated their belief in the news at an abysmal 37 out of 100.

Implicit in both the report and its findings was the assumption that journalism should be objective and nonpartisan—and that the current state of affairs is unusual because it lacks both qualities...

...

Americans consumed more or less the same news, which made it easier to agree on a single set of facts and narratives. Such consensus, unthinkable today, also stemmed from the existing political dynamics. In the postwar years, Democrats and Republicans were not the attack-oriented and ideologically disciplined teams they have become today but rather two loose, overlapping coalitions, with national programs similar enough to one another’s that they didn’t require entirely different facts and values to justify their existence.

The article reads a bit like a history lesson. Three points I'd put forward though:

(1) Even mainstream liberal bodies are now admitting that the news is biased.

(2) They seemingly think this is okay; I would have presumed that it's not ideal.

(3) They seem to agree on a point I've made here and there, which is that Democrats and Republicans used to represent the same ideology, not two different ideologies as has happened recently.

[The Immortal Goon]

I would expand your third point.

There was a consensus among Democrats and Republicans. But this was an artificial state as a result of the World Wars and the Cold War. If you look before the World Wars, it was not uncommon for Democrat and Republican politicians to shoot and stab each other. Among the party loyalists there was virtually nothing that they wouldn’t do to each other to cheat, maim, and kill the other.

This isn’t two opposing ideologies: this is how liberal democracies work. There are a lot of monied interests in who gets to cut the deals.

Hell, even between the Wars, it was back to normal. Most people today would have a hard time remembering who was the Republican or Democrat in the election between William Harding and James Cox. But this was a fierce battle that everyone thought was between two huge world views that would set the stage for what the world would look like and so on and so forth.

In retrospect, even if there was all kinds and nasty bitterness and dirty tricks, it was obviously all just liberalism at the end of the day.

And so it remains now.