When I was growing up, content distribution about the country and the world was limited to the nightly news on the three major networks.
Between the nightly news and the newspaper, in our case, the Washington Post, people felt educated about everything going on in the world.
That didn't mean there wasn't debate on the content being provided. How much of the information broadcasted was representative of what was truly going on, and how much was it to fulfill an agenda? Who was influencing what stories were greenlighted? What was their background? Where did they fall politically?
Even in the times that some think were the "glory days," the legitimacy of content was being questioned.