Thank you for the question, Mr. Van Loan.
I'd say that I'm first off sensitive to the history, having spent a good part of my career in George Brown's descendent newspaper. The days that you speak of have been referred to in the academic materials as the libertarian age of the press, in which truth and falsehood grappled in the way that John Milton described in “Areopagitica”.
We have some problems with that today. In those days there were 20 newspapers per community; now there are maybe one, maybe two, and some radio outlets.