Mary Todd Lincoln's faux pas (plural), worse, and much worse

[STS Lincolnite]

(07-05-2014 10:52 AM)David Lockmiller Wrote:  

(07-05-2014 03:27 AM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  So, and I wonder how one can draw such a hard judgement from such weak evidence as you did in the beginning of this thread. Injust IMO.

I was thinking about that last night. A newspaper, especially a major newspaper, must know how important it is to its own long-term existence that it print the truth and only the truth. People do not read newspapers for fictional accounts of history.

David, from everything I have read, I think this is much more true today than it would have been in the mid-19th century. The vast majority of newspapers, large and small alike, were far from what we would consider fair and balanced today. Newspapers were in the habit of promoting a particular agenda - mostly political in nature. One would only have to read various newspaper's accounts of/responses to Lincoln's remarks at Gettysburg to find examples of this. Their interest was not so much in printing the truth, but in printing the "truth" as they saw it or printing items/pieces that were consistent with that "truth" in order to further their own agenda. The readers of the time understood that and would likely have reacted (or perhaps not reacted) in a very different way than we might today. I am reminded of some of the old time presidential campaigns (Jefferson/Adams and Adams/Jackson to name a couple). Some of the things that were written were absolutely terrible and were nothing but blatant fabrications.