Oh, how you have changed

[TinCow]

At any point previous. It has been a gradual process. I first became aware of the disparity in the 1970s and that disparity in truth and reporting has studiedly grown.

Your glasses. They are also rose colored.

To be less flippant though, you're really mistaken. This is a perception you have because you haven't actually seen old-school media in depth. For my undergraduate thesis, I read every single issue of The Times from January 1, 1933, to December 31, 1939. Those papers were certainly not "open and honest." While they allowed the expression of divergent views, they had massive political bias in both their reporting and their editorializing that is obvious to modern eyes. That was a UK paper, but I would not expect to find anything different in the US during the same period. Some media outlets backed the government, others backed the opposition, but all were significantly biased. Today is much better simply because the consumer has a much larger choice of sources, so they can get around the new monopoly that used to be held by their local media outlets.