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Past Present
ByA century and a half ago, the American news media were small, polemical, often heavily subsidized by political parties and relatively poor. Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune with $1,000 in capital. That was obviously more money in 1841 than it is today, but even then, it was not so much money, not the kind of money needed to start a railway or a foundry, more like the kind of money used to start a nice looking Web site today.
Drop by a successful political blog, and you'll notice something -- ads, lots of ads, but special ads, ads from political candidates. Partisans give money to politicians, who pay money to blogs, in order to raise more money from partisans. Again, that looks more like Horace Greeley than like Walter Cronkite's CBS, and even the big media seem to be trending in this direction.
Fox News was created as America's first self-consciously partisan television network. The success of Fox has called forth the flattery of imitation from MSNBC. Partisanship makes political news pay, and that suggests that if we're going to continue to enjoy political news, we're going to have to tolerate a more partisan media. It's a grim bargain, but then our parents thought that having to endure all those ex-lax commercials during the nightly news was a pretty grim bargain, too.
