I understand that every news source expresses a point of view. But I believe that some attempt is made to limit clearly politically supportive attitudes in many mainstream media outlets. (I know, I know - that’s open to debate. I’m not debating that here, I’m starting from that assumption.) My question is this: 40, 50, or 60 years ago, were there major news outlets that held obviously politically biased positions? I realize that many city newspapers, e.g. The Chicago Tribune, were owned by people with strong affinity to certain political positions. Still, I’m of the (naive?) belief that the news was not slanted, although the editorial positions might have been. Was there anything in the 60s or 70s that was a parallel to, say, Fox News with their clearly biased points of view?
From a personal perspective it didn’t seem so. Though the news coverage did seem to be somewhat “biased” by popular opinion. During Viet Nam, anti-war protests were more favorably covered the more anti-war opinion became the norm it seemed to me.
Newspapers have eternally been fairly partisan, the “Paper of Record” type of papers usually tried to segregate it to the Editorial Board and their articles, but there were a lot of print media in the mid-20th century and earlier.
Broadcast media had this requirement to dedicate one hour of air time each day to the news, and they were also not allowed to air commercials. These national news broadcasts for one, didn’t want to be overtly political because the audience was the whole country, there were only three networks. For two, due to the fact the news hour wasn’t commercialized, it was honestly viewed as akin to a public service, a cost of doing business if you want to run a TV station. Finally, I think there were somewhat unwritten understanding that since this was a requirement as a part of their license to broadcast on the public airwaves, they shouldn’t use that time to advocate strongly for this political party or that political party.
In the days when cities had two (or more) newspapers, one was almost always conservative and the other almost always liberal. It wasn’t just the editorial pages, either. Conservative newspapers were strongly pro-business, and played up crime stories. Liberal newspapers played up social issues. Both sides loved to go after government corruption, although with different slants.
Local TV stations simply didn’t have the resources to do much more than the bare minimum of news, and when they did, it was often stuff like scheduled news conferences or recaps of big stories that the newspapers had already broken.
The nightly news shows were not much more than headline services, but the three networks spent a lot of money on documentaries, and many of them had a decided point of view. CBS News famously took on Senator Joe McCarthy, and a few years later launched a firestorm of debate with Harvest of Shame, an hour-long study of the plight of migrant farm workers. Then, in a 1968 documentary, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite essentially declared the Vietnam War unwinnable, and urged the U.S. to seek a negotiated settlement.
For a long, long^ look at the state of journalism in that era, David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be goes deeply into the background of some major news organizations, and details the tensions between older management and the new generation of reporters.
^ Almost 800 pages, including notes.
I need to ask for a cite on this. Broadcast media were “to serve the public interest,” but that was a vague phrase that could be met in any number of ways. Nor did the Fairness Doctrine require an hour of news. As for commercials, one of the first network news shows was John Cameron Swayze on the Camel News Caravan in 1949. I don’t remember any subsequent bans on commercials.
As for the larger issue, most newspapers and many magazines were politically slanted. It took courage for a Southern newspaper to provide fair coverage of the civil rights movement, and few of them tried. Vietnam was widely supported in most newspapers and antiwar articles weren’t welcome. Really, anything the government did in the sixties, from the space race to anticommunism, was given glowing coverage. Even during and after Nixon, most newspapers slanted their coverage toward Republicans.
Time magazine had become increasingly conservative, with Newsweek deliberately positioning itself as the liberal alternative and marketing heavily on college campuses. Right-wing magazines like The National Review drove the establishment’s coverage the way the New York Times does for today’s news. The Times was much farther right in the 60s though.
Radio had a number of right-wing broadcasters, like Carl McIntyre, as big a name then as Rush Limbaugh is today. The right likes to say that the Kennedy administration used its powers to start rigorous enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine to quash them.
The news media was almost entirely conservative until civil rights/hippies/Vietnam/Nixon happened. The Nixonian war on reporters pushed many outlets to the left, but that mostly meant to ostensibly neutral or objective coverage. Very little of the mainstream media ever was as explicitly leftist as the right-wing media was rightist.
I remember many decades ago I wanted to write a science fiction novel set on an earthlike Mars where the newspapers were so split on their coverage that two different realities resulted. I never could figure out anything that complex, but I wish I had made a stab; it would be endlessly talked about today as prophetic. That I could consider doing so with newspapers says a lot about the Nixon era.
I think I was conflating a few different things from memory here, after review I do not believe there was ever a requirement to do an once per day news broadcast or a limit on running commercials during the broadcast. Beefing my memory back up on things about spectrum regulation, I think what I was confusing it with was the broad public interest and public trustee model the FCC operates under, which at least historically was held to mean stations had to cover a certain range of topics to suit varying tastes and needs. Particularly due to the spectrum being a limited resource not freely available to all. In the early days I believe what constituted necessary program was much more specific, and was curtailed over time, for example under the original FRA (predecessor to the FCC) there were requirements of a few different genres of music (including classical and “light classical”), and things of that nature. From this write up on the early eras of FCC regulations there was an expansive list in the 60s that came about after public hearings ( The Public Interest Standard in Television Broadcasting (unt.edu)):
The result was nineteen days of hearings and testimony from more than ninety witnesses, culminating in the FCC’s 1960 report, Report and Statement of Policy re: Commission en banc Programming Inquiry . Widely known as the 1960 Programming Policy Statement , the report listed fourteen “major elements usually necessary to the public interest”:
Opportunity for local self-expression.
The development and use of local talent.
Programs for children.
Religious programs.
Educational programs.
Public affairs programs.
Editorialization by licensees.
Political broadcasts.
Agricultural programs.
News programs.
Weather and market services.
Sports programs.
Service to minority groups.
Entertainment programming.The FCC noted that the categories were not intended as “a rigid mold or fixed formula for station operations,” but rather were “indicia of the types and areas of service” that constitute the public obligations of broadcasters, as evaluated at license renewal time.
Enforcement of this, and specific amount of hours per day per topic, as far as I can tell, was not done, so that’s something I was just off base on.
The Wall Street Journal was, for many years, a paper with a conservative editorial page, but the news side was rigorously factual, if dry, and only a little conservative. After the Murdochs took over, the WSJ changed. This is GQ, so I won’t say more.
Here’s another thing that may have gotten blurry over time: Commercial ads were allowed during a news program, but they weren’t allowed to be part of the program.
For example, at some point in a news program today, the same person who just told you what was going on Washington will switch to another story, with such tantalizing descriptions that you’d call it clickbait if there were something to click on. But alas, it was only a teaser for the show that will be on tomorrow night. That kind of “commercial within a program” was forbidden back then.
I couldn’t find the cite for this earlier, but in the 1960s, WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss. was so unabashedly pro-segregationist that the owner eventually lost its broadcast license. Among the station’s favorite tricks was to completely block any network news (it was an NBC affiliate) of Civil Rights, even to the point of cutting off programs, claiming technical difficulties.
In the UK, the BBC wasn’t initially allowed to compete with the press in providing news, so simply had news headlines provided by the press agencies (in the process, seeing off an attempt by Churchill to run it as a government propaganda operation during the General Strike of 1926). It did have “commentary” talks on current affairs, though within strict limits on partisanship. The ultimate limit of the dependence on news agencies came in 1930 when the announcer simply said “There is no news tonight”!
Obviously, WW2 brought a massive build-up of news on the radio, with developments like live recordings from correspondents embedded in operations, with the ultimate being Richard Dimbleby’s reports on the liberated concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.
TV news remained short, studio-bound headlines for a long time, and interviews with political leaders and the like were, by today’s standards, obsequious (there’s a clip somewhere of PM Attlee giving monosyllabic answers to questions on his talks with Truman trying to rein in MacArthur in Korea, which ends up
“Is there anything else you’d like to say, Prime Minister?”
“I don’t think so, no”.
The press, on the other hand, was always partisan to varying degrees, and what you read said who you were (still does, if you buy a paper). In the 60s/70s there was a joke (picked up for Yes, Minister) which with some modifications still has a lot of truth:
The Times is read by people who run the country.
The Financial Times is read by people who really run the country
The Telegraph is read by people who used to run the country
The Guardian is read by people who think they should run the country
The Daily Mail is read by people who think their husbands should run the country
The Daily Express is read by people who think the country should be run the way it used to be run
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think the unions should run the country
The Daily Worker is read by people who think the Soviets should run the country
The Sun is read by people who don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big knockers.

The Sun is read by people who don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big knockers.
For those who don’t know, this is not a joke. (SFW).
Newspapers were always expected to keep the OP-ED and the news separate and while there might be some slants in the latter, generally papers were expected to keep to strictly the facts.
The choice of topics and the varying prominence of their placement is also “slanting”, at all levels of the press. But our tabloids have always tended to editorialise in their headlines and front page spreads. The assumptions as to their readers’ opinions/mindset are obvious.
The Mail, for example, led its report on a court judgement relating to the handling of Brexit (that they didn’t like) simply with “Enemies of the People” (and back in the 30s their proprietor used the paper to promote his enthusiasm for the then British Union of Fascists).
I kind of think they were all slanted to a degree back in the day, but news was more local back then, so much national/international news was from wire services or parent networks, while state and local stuff was their purview.
I’d always heard griping out of friends, relatives and acquaintances that were generally along the lines of editorial bias- what stories were published/run, what they emphasized, etc… but without any implication that the stories themselves were untrue, or so biased as to be misleading. For example, they might get irritated that one paper or the other would cover the State Legislature and spend all their time on school funding and social programs, instead of covering budget shortfalls and prison funding, or something like that. But not that they were making stuff up, or being deliberately untruthful or anything like that.
Does nobody any more Remember the Maine?

I couldn’t find the cite for this earlier, but in the 1960s, WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss. was so unabashedly pro-segregationist that the owner eventually lost its broadcast license. Among the station’s favorite tricks was to completely block any network news (it was an NBC affiliate) of Civil Rights, even to the point of cutting off programs, claiming technical difficulties.
As I understood, the problem was that in the Good Old Days the radio spectrum was very limited - 12 channels and only so many AM stations. (And TV stations typically could cause interference if they were too close in frequency, so often the area limit was 6 - Buffalo for example had a Ch.2 and Ch.4) The government regulated a very scarce resource for the benefit of the general public. As a result, broadcast licenses were hard to get and the FCC imposed serious limits on what was allowed. Excessively partisan slant, indecent material (or too controversial) could cause difficulties at license renewal time.
IIR at the time, following the same logic, the CRTC in Canada, for example, regulated not just TV and radio licenses, but for radio stations it included the type of station to ensure they were not all Top-40 stations: There were pop and country, classical, all news, etc. I assume up to the 70’s or 80’s the FCC did the same.
(Friend of mine related attending a CRTC hearing where they were trying to get a braodcast license for the campus radio. The company before them was renewing their pop-music radio license, The regulators played a clip of a number of their news stories along the lines of “…the police pulled a stiff out of the harbour…” read in a sensationalist voice like a movie trailer, then asked the station’s lawyers what age group listened to the station and whether they though this was appropriate material for that age group? This was apparently a warning to clean up their act or next time lose their license.)
With the advent of UHF, and then cable with essentially unlimited content not using the “public airwaves” the logic of a requirement to ensure the diversity of appropriate viewpoints and material for a limited number of available channels no longer applied. Hence, Fox News fighting with OANN for the bottom of the barrel.
That’s not to say a TV station could not be partisan. It just had to be subtle about it so as not to annoy the FCC. After all, the guys making those decisions for the FCC could have belonged to the other party in 4 years. An elephant never forgets, and a donkey has a kick like a mule.
(Should add too, as seems to be portrayed in numerous shows loosely based on real life - the older management at the time would be somewhat conservative, while the young eager reporters were more liberal and concerned about the social justice issues the encountered in their work. Numerous memoirs discussed management pushing back on too liberal reporting.)
By the standards of today’s broadcast media, the national news sources of the 1970s really strained to stay nonpartisan. That didn’t mean all readers saw them as fair and balanced.
At the time of Watergate, the three newsweeklies offered special subscriptions to high-school students, and government classes frequently required students to subscribe to one for “current events” discussions. The Texarkana, Texas, school board (and probably others) decided that Newsweek and Time were obsessed with this Watergate thing and unfairly trying to hound Nixon from office, and decreed that U.S. News & World Report was the only newsweekly that could be used in the classroom.
Ironically, this edict was applied to my class when school began in Sept. 1974, even though there had been some further developments in the Nixon presidency the previous month.
if i remeber didnt a lot of newspapers have names like " the republican" or some variation of "democrat " in their names? id assume that would tell you what side they were on

As I understood, the problem was that in the Good Old Days the radio spectrum was very limited - 12 channels and only so many AM stations. (And TV stations typically could cause interference if they were too close in frequency, so often the area limit was 6 - Buffalo for example had a Ch.2 and Ch.4) …
The commercial radio spectrum has always been limited–there’s a reason why our AM transistor radios went from 5.3 KHz to 11.6KHz (or whatever); and our FM radios went from 89.9 to 109.9 MHz (or whatever). Especially in the FM band, when you go higher, you get into aircraft frequencies–a private pilot friend demonstrated once in his Cessna, when we were waiting for permission to take off, being as we were about fourth in line to take off. “Wanna kill time listening to the radio?” he asked, and dialed the radio down to CHUM-FM, 104.5 MHz. When the aircraft in front of us started rolling, he dialed the radio back to the ATC, at 123-something MHz. As I recall from flying with him many times, ground control at Toronto Island is 123.45 MHz.
Television was different, and the fact that it had channels reflected that. Channel 2 might actually be XXX.YY MHz for video, but AAA.BB KHz for the audio (or something like that). A TV channel was two frequencies mixed into a channel, while radio just needed one frequency.
The Canada-US border created its own problems, especially in southern Ontario/Western New York state, where the CRTC and the FCC had to work together so as to not allow TV channels and radio stations to overlap each other. As a result, back in the day of rabbit ears and before cable, Toronto TV viewers could get seven VHF channels: 2 (NBC, Buffalo), 3 (CBC, Barrie, but always snowy), 4 (CBS, Buffalo), 5 (CBC, Toronto), 7 (ABC, Buffalo), 9 (CTV, Toronto), and 11 (Independent, Hamilton).
I guess the point that I’m taking a long time to make is that the radio spectrum has always been limited. There are commercial AM radio frequencies, commercial FM frequencies, aircraft frequencies, CB frequencies, Ham frequencies, military frequencies, data frequencies, and so on. Each has a place on the spectrum, which is finite, and thus is necessarily limited.
IIR at the time, following the same logic, the CRTC in Canada, for example, regulated not just TV and radio licenses, but for radio stations it included the type of station to ensure they were not all Top-40 stations: There were pop and country, classical, all news, etc. I assume up to the 70’s or 80’s the FCC did the same.
I don’t think the CRTC ever did that. Radio stations were free to set their own formats in the market where they were located. If you thought you could make your station a ratings giant by going all-news, go ahead. If you want to go up against the city’s established Top-40 station, by switching formats to Top-40, go ahead. (And Toronto’s 680 CFTR, which had been a nothing-special, something-inoffensive-your-parents-listened-to, did just that against 1050 CHUM in the 1970s.) And 1430 CKFH was just a wannabe 1010 CFRB until it broadcast Maple Leafs and Blue Jays games. But I don’t recall that the CRTC dictated formats when granting licenses.

if i remeber didnt a lot of newspapers have names like " the republican" or some variation of "democrat " in their names? id assume that would tell you what side they were on
I’m not old enough to remember this, but I think there was a time when a city of a certain size would support at least two newspapers. A republican one and a democrat one. Bigger cities might have multiple competing newspapers, maybe even a socialist workers paper or just a tabloid.
But the most partisan slanted news was limited to the editorial section.
As others have mentioned, the placement and amount, of news was always slanted by the editorial viewpoint of the owner/staff.
But the “news”, I think was somewhat factual. This politician said or did this thing, we have sources to back it up. Whether that is bold headlines on the front page or hidden on page 6, was an editorial decision.
I would would compare that with our current system of cable news which is 90% editorial page, not so much hard news.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find examples of the news portion of the WSJ being politically slanted to the right these days. The editorial and op-ed sections, on the other hand…
Back in the '60s-'70s I used to read the N.Y. Daily News once in a while, when someone had left a copy on the subway.* While the editorial section was slanted towards what passed for the Right in those days (for instance, pro-Nixon), I don’t recall the news section as being biased, except toward trashiness.
*referencing an old joke about the excuse people gave for being caught reading the Daily News. “Oh, I’d never buy it, but somebody left a copy on the IRT.”