https://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/01/02/how-the-sausage-gets-made/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usSat, 13 Jun 2026 03:19:58 -0400<![CDATA[Until the rise of first conservative forums such as Free Republic in the mid-1990s (who would later instantly pounce on Dan Rather&#8217;s forged documents in September of 2004), and then Matt Drudge and eventually the Blogosphere, most consumers of news had little idea of how the sausage was made, other than sensationalistic Hollywood productions such as All the President&#8217;s Men and Lou Grant. The one exception prior to the rise of the Web might have been during the early 1980s. That was when the first commercially available satellite dishes went on the market, and savvy users with early VCRs recorded television journalists beaming their videotaped reports across the country and anchormen prepping for the nightly news, before the networks started scrambling their product to prevent unwanted downloads. The sort of &#8220;found footage&#8221; collected by Harry Shearer is typical of this genre.]]>Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:34:11 -0500<![CDATA[Ed Driscoll]]>https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2012/01/02/how-the-sausage-gets-made-n255047