Public media organizations like the BBC and CBC face a fundamental dilemma. If they produce dry, impartial, fact-based content, they risk losing their audience to more engaging, narrative-driven competitors. But if they adopt narratives to attract viewers, they are immediately accused of bias, creating a no-win situation.
Soviet outlets like Pravda saw themselves as truthful because their individual facts were accurate, despite being framed within a non-impartial communist narrative. This highlights the critical distinction between mere accuracy and the broader, now-unfashionable, goal of genuine impartiality in journalism.
The century-long journalistic tradition of impartial, 'scientific' fact-gathering was allegedly dismantled by the baby boomer generation. Finding dry reporting dull, they championed an activist, narrative-driven style—seen in underground press coverage of Vietnam—which has since become the mainstream media's dominant mode.
Pervasive media bias isn't an Orwellian, centrally-directed phenomenon. Instead, it's an emergent, herd-like behavior similar to a flock of birds moving in unison without a single leader, driven by a quasi-religious belief in shared narratives among a specific socioeconomic class of journalists.
The ideal of impartial journalism emerged in the Victorian era as a deliberate break from narrative-led reporting. The Times of London’s coverage of the Crimean War, which truthfully exposed military incompetence rather than promoting a heroic narrative, serves as a key historical example of this new, 'scientific' approach.
The current era of tribal, narrative-driven media mirrors the pre-Enlightenment period of vicious religious wars fueled by moral certainty. The historical Enlightenment arose because society grew exhausted by this violence, suggesting that a return to reason and impartiality may only follow a similar period of societal burnout.