When Americans lost faith in the news
&gt; <i>Half a century ago, most of the public said they trusted the news media.</i><p><i>That</i> was the aberration.   120 years ago when newspapers owned by the likes of William Hearst were doing their best to start unnecessary wars for shits and giggles, would you have trusted the news media?  I hope not.<p>The news industry was crooked then, and I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any reason to believe the American media briefly became trustworthy in the mid 20th century when public trust in the media was at all-time highs.  I think Americans got caught up in a post-war optimistic fervor that blinded them to the faults of American media, and American society in general.  Now the news media feel entitled to that level of trust which they never deserved in the first place.<p>Reminder that one of America&#x27;s most beloved &quot;founding fathers&quot; was a newspaperman propagandist.  A man called Benjamin Franklin, who founded numerous newspapers specifically to push the revolutionary narrative in colonial America.  Say what you like about the man, but impartial reporting was not his priority.  The supposed age of impartial trustworthiness in news media is myth, not history.  Newspapers have always been the tools of those who own them.