How Information Has Always Been Controlled — and Who Controls It Now
This guide does not tell you what to think about any media outlet, political party, or platform. It traces how the control of information has shifted across 600 years — and what that pattern means for you as a citizen today. Understand Issues. Decide for Yourself.
| At a Glance — The Information Control Arc | |
| Medieval | Most people illiterate. The town crier was the only news channel — controlled by the crown. |
| 1440 | Gutenberg’s press — first democratization of information. Power moved immediately to control it. |
| 1776 | Thomas Paine’s Common Sense — pamphlets as civic technology. Citizens seize the channel. |
| 1900 | 10,000 visual impressions/day (industry estimate). Hearst and Pulitzer run circulation wars on sensationalism. |
| 1969 | 3 networks, 1 shared reality. ~80% of Americans watch the same evening news. |
| 1987 | Fairness Doctrine repealed. Balance is no longer required. Opinion becomes programming. |
| 2006 | Facebook’s News Feed launches. The algorithm begins learning — and filtering — your world. |
| 2025 | 6,000–10,000 ads/day + unlimited algorithm-curated content. The filter is invisible and total. |
| The question | Who told the town crier what to say? The answer has always defined what citizens know. |
Hear Ye, Hear Ye — and Do What You’re Told
Before newspapers, before radio, before the internet, most people in medieval Europe were illiterate. There was no way to read the news because there was no news to read. The spoken word, passed person to person, was the only channel — and its most powerful form was the official town crier.
The town crier was not a neutral messenger. He was a legal instrument of the crown. His proclamations carried the force of law. To ignore him was to ignore the king. To harm him was an act of treason. He opened every announcement with “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” — from the French for “hear ye” — and what followed came directly from whoever held power: the monarch, the lord, the church.
The critical question for citizens living in that era was not “Is this true?” It was “Who is telling me this, and what do they want from me?” Most people had no way to check. There was no other channel. The town crier was the algorithm.
“The town crier was not a journalist. He was a broadcast system owned by power.”
Gutenberg Changes Everything — and Power Tries to Take It Back
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, developed around 1440, was the first genuine disruption of centralized information control. For the first time, identical copies of a text could be produced quickly and cheaply enough to reach ordinary people. The Bible — previously hand-copied by monks and accessible only to the church and the wealthy — could now be printed and distributed widely.
The consequences were enormous and immediate. Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in 1517; within weeks, printed copies had spread across Europe. The Reformation — which split Western Christianity — was, in significant part, a media event made possible by the printing press.
Power recognized the threat immediately. In England, Queen Mary I chartered the Stationers’ Company in 1557 — a royal guild given authority to supervise printing and decide what could legally be published. The pattern was already clear: a new technology democratizes information; those in power move to regulate and control it.
In colonial America, that pattern was broken for the first time. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense — published in January 1776 — sold 500,000 copies in a nation of 2.5 million people. Pamphlets and broadsheets became the first citizen-controlled communication channel. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined press freedom as a constitutional right — a direct response to the experience of living under a crown that controlled the message.
1900: New Barons, Same Game
By the late 1800s, daily newspapers had become mass media. The invention of high-speed presses and the telegraph made it possible to print hundreds of thousands of copies and distribute them the same day. For the first time, a large share of the American public could read the same news on the same morning.
But the gatekeepers had changed — not disappeared. Government censors were replaced by private media barons. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer ran competing newspapers in New York City and turned sensation into a business model. The journalism of that era became known as “Yellow Journalism” — lurid headlines, exaggerated stories, manufactured outrage — all in service of one goal: selling more papers.
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” — William Randolph Hearst, to illustrator Frederic Remington, 1897
The parallels to today are not subtle. Hearst’s engagement metric was circulation. Today’s platforms measure clicks, shares, and time on screen. The underlying logic is identical: emotional content — fear, outrage, tribal identity — drives more engagement than calm, factual reporting. The technology changed. The incentive did not.
What was different: Hearst’s bias was visible. You knew it was his paper. You could buy a competing one. And the Progressive movement that followed — the muckrakers, investigative journalism, the eventual creation of the FCC — was a direct civic response to concentrated media power. The public recognized the problem and demanded reform.
The Brief Shared Moment: 1949–1987
The Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, required broadcast stations to present both sides of controversial public issues. It was an imperfect rule — it applied only to licensed broadcasters, not newspapers or cable — but it created a structural incentive for balance on the dominant medium of the era.
Combined with the economics of broadcast television — three networks competing for the same general audience — the result was something historically unusual: a shared information environment. By 1969, roughly 80% of American households were watching one of three network evening news programs. Walter Cronkite closed every CBS broadcast with “And that’s the way it is.” For most of America, it actually was.
This shared moment had real limits. The gatekeepers — three network news divisions led by white men in New York — reflected the biases of their class and era. Voices were excluded. The civil rights movement was covered late and poorly. Women were largely absent from reporting. Shared facts are not the same as shared justice.
But something important was true: Americans largely agreed on a common factual baseline, even when they disagreed about what it meant. That baseline is now gone.
We’ve Always Built Our Own Bubbles
Before declaring the past a golden age, it’s worth being honest: people have always filtered their information and sorted themselves into tribes. The advertising industry estimated that even before the internet, a consumer might encounter up to 10,000 visual impressions daily — billboards, magazine covers, cereal boxes, storefronts, television ads. And consumers filtered them, with their wallets and their loyalties.
Ford vs Chevy. Cheerios vs Frosted Flakes. American League vs National League. Reader’s Digest vs Time. These were real tribal identities — sometimes fierce. Ask a Red Sox fan about the Yankees.
The difference is what those bubbles cost. Your brand loyalty was conscious — you picked your team, you knew it was a preference, and your neighbor drove a Chevy and you still had a beer together. The stakes were bragging rights, not civic reality.
| The Old Bubble (Ford vs Chevy) | The Algorithm Bubble | |
| Who chose it? | You did — consciously | The algorithm did — invisibly |
| Based on | Personal experience, family, community | Your behavioral data: clicks, pauses, reactions |
| Transparency | You knew it was a preference | You think you’re seeing everything. You’re not. |
| Stakes | Brand loyalty, bragging rights | Elections, public health, civic reality |
| Opt out? | Yes — try the other cereal | Difficult — the algorithm follows you across platforms |
| Who benefits? | You (maybe) and the brand | The platform — your engagement is the product |
“The algorithm didn’t create tribalism. It monetized it.”
The Fairness Doctrine Falls — and the Flood Begins
In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine. The stated reason: enough channels now existed that audiences could find balance on their own. The practical result: broadcasters could pick a side and stay there. Talk radio exploded within months. Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated program launched in 1988 and reached 20 million listeners within a few years.
Fox News launched in 1996 — built explicitly for a conservative audience. MSNBC repositioned for a liberal one. Cable news fragmented into ideological lanes, each finding massive, loyal, emotionally engaged audiences. By the early 2000s, you could live entirely inside a media environment that confirmed everything you already believed. And that was before the algorithm.
The Algorithm: The Invisible Town Crier
When Facebook launched its News Feed in 2006, it introduced something genuinely new to information control: a system that watched what you paid attention to and used that behavioral data to decide what you’d see next. No editor. No standard. No requirement for balance or accuracy. Just: what keeps you on the platform longest?
The answer the algorithm found was not calm, factual reporting. It was emotion — specifically outrage, fear, and tribal confirmation. Content that made you feel your side was right and the other side was dangerous generated more clicks, more shares, and more time on screen than any other category.
In 2011, author Eli Pariser named what he called the “filter bubble” — what we might call your personal town crier. Personalization algorithms don’t just show you what you like. They tend to de-prioritize what disagrees with your existing beliefs. Two people in the same household can now inhabit completely different information realities — not because they chose different news sources, but because algorithms sorted them into separate feeds based on behavioral data neither consented to share.
The town crier announced whose message you’d receive. The algorithm does the same — invisibly, automatically, at a scale no monarch in history could have imagined, and optimized not for the king’s agenda but for a technology company’s advertising revenue.
“You cannot fact-check your way out of a personal town crier. You can only recognize that it exists.”
How to See Your Own Bubble
The hardest part of the personal town crier is that it’s invisible from inside. The fish doesn’t know it’s in water. Here are practical tools for citizens who want to check their own information environment:
- The emotional reaction test. If a story makes you feel immediately vindicated or immediately outraged, slow down. Strong emotion is the algorithm working. That’s the moment to verify, not to share.
- The reverse partisan test. Before sharing a political story, ask: if my party did this exact thing, would I still think it was newsworthy? If the answer is no, you’re reading tribal content — not civic information.
- Go to the primary source. Read the actual bill text. The actual study. The actual court ruling. Not someone’s summary of it. Summaries contain the summarizer’s choices.
- Use AllSides.com. It shows the same story as reported by left, center, and right outlets simultaneously. Not to say all sides are equal — but to show what different information environments look like.
- Ask who owns it. Before trusting a media outlet, spend 60 seconds finding out who owns it and what their financial interests are. Ownership doesn’t determine truth, but it explains incentives.
- The 24-hour rule. Breaking news is almost always wrong in some important way within the first 24 hours. Wait before sharing.
- Talk to real people. Not social media people — actual neighbors, colleagues, family members who disagree with you. The algorithm can’t sort a conversation.
None of these tools eliminates the personal town crier. The algorithm is pervasive and embedded in daily life for any individual habit to fully counter it. But citizens who understand the mechanism are harder to manipulate than citizens who don’t — and that has always been true, from the town crier to the news feed.
The Pattern That Repeats
Six hundred years of communication history suggests one consistent pattern: a new technology democratizes information; those in power move to control it; citizens eventually push back.
The printing press was followed by censorship guilds. Yellow Journalism was followed by the Progressive movement and the muckrakers. Broadcast concentration was followed by the Fairness Doctrine. The question citizens face today is whether the algorithmic era will produce its own reform — and what that reform might look like.
That is a political and civic question, not a technical one. The technology is not neutral. But the response to it never has been either.
Questions Every Citizen Should Ask
- Who controls the channel I’m using — and what are their financial incentives?
- What is this content making me feel, and why? Outrage and certainty are signs to slow down.
- Am I seeing multiple perspectives on this issue, or only the version that confirms what I already believe?
- What am I NOT seeing? The personal town crier hides as much as it shows.
- Is this a reported fact, an expert opinion, or someone’s interpretation? All three are different things.
- Before I share: is it true, is it current, and does the source have an interest in my believing it?
Where to Read More
- Eli Pariser — The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (2011)
- AllSides.com — same story, three perspectives, side by side
- Pew Research Center — annual News Consumption and Media Attitudes surveys
- Nieman Lab (Harvard) — journalism and digital media research
- Reuters Institute Digital News Report — international, annual
- FCC history of the Fairness Doctrine — fcc.gov
- History.com — Town Criers Were the Original Social Media