I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything. There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but not much, at least not looking back on it.
I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought like I thought, there would have to be at least some newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor getting in between. I found out that there were a lot of people who thought the way I did. A lot of people who disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90% identical.
I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get the genie back into the bottle.
> I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything.
This was the era of satantic panic[1], D&D being controversial due to devil worship, and when democrats and republicans joined hand in hand to try and outlaw vulgarity.
The 80s was absurdly conservative.
A regular talking point on 90s TV newscasts was about if it is ok for a man to kill another man who (romantically) hits on him. That was an actual topic the country was divided over.
1990s America, also not a bastion of radial left thinking.
If that's the way you remember it (I don't remember it that way, but to each their own) then an unfettered medium like 4chan is still a positive break from a handful of stodgy old ideologues controlling the conversation.
(I even disagree with both the left and the right on some things).
Censorship of music and art was a bipartisan push.
My entire point was that the entire country was more conservative, a point I was demonstrating by showing a time when Democrats and Republicans joining hand in hand to censor music from black musicians. (They also tried to censor violent video games, and the entire internet!)
> Um... you do know that Tipper Gore was and still is an adamant leftist,
I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything. There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but not much, at least not looking back on it.
I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought like I thought, there would have to be at least some newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor getting in between. I found out that there were a lot of people who thought the way I did. A lot of people who disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90% identical.
I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get the genie back into the bottle.