Better to be uninformed than misinformed, I suppose.
Pity that it's so difficult nowadays to be accurately informed about anything.
Pity that it's so difficult nowadays to be accurately informed about anything.
I guess you mean the period in human civilization where there was widespread literacy but also a high cost of mass producing and distributing texts, assuming people with money to invest in reporters can't be stupid or misinformed.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w... Depending on where you draw that line, that never really happened (I would call 'widespread' around 80%, which happened in 2000 but then there was already an internet, although it was a niche and playful version of what it is today).
Rather, this kind of thing seems to ebb and flow a bit. And right now it smells like low tide.
I feel like my generation (90s) is a lot better informed than almost any parent, let alone grandparent. But maybe that's too long a scale and you rather mean low tide on the span of the past handful of years, on which I don't really have an opinion / can't really say
People are more informed than ever before.
The past looks better only because it is a distorted view from a lack of information at that time.
Hot take: People don't read them as much because people don't read "news" to be informed in an unbiased manner, they read news to be entertained.