During the golden age of newspapers, when a city might have a dozen different newspapers, every single one of those newspapers was an explicitly biased propaganda rag. The newspaper boom was an era when newspapers served as easily consumable combinations of news and entertainment designed to sell advertising space. The definitive heyday of newspapers was the era of yellow journalism. The business model of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, or Breitbart would be clearly recognizable to Hearst and Pulitzer.
When TV and radio shrunk the newspaper industry, this gave way to local monopolies (or duopolies) of center-left and occasionally center-right newspapers that pretended to be unbiased, and eventually an oligarchy of center-left television networks. This left a large market opportunity, and as soon as the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, right-wing talk radio emerged. CNN proved the viability of cable news but kept the same center-left, pretend-impartial bias as the networks, so Fox News erupted on the scene.
The supposed integrity and ethics of journalism, so far as they even existed, were a luxury that newspapers could afford because the decline of the newspaper industry led to monopolies. Just like Bell Labs was a luxury borne from the telecommunications monopoly of the mid-20th century.
If you have a monopoly on the news, you have a vested interest in marketing yourself as unbiased (in order to have the largest addressable market). You do not have a vested interest in being unbiased. Aside from the natural beliefs and biases of the journalists themselves, there is also a structural bias towards sensationalism and another structural bias in favor of the establishment (or else you lose access). Even the desire to appear unbiased introduces a bias--unbiased coverage one disagrees with looks like biased coverage, so mechanisms like bias towards the center and "he said/she said" reporting about matters of fact show up.
The 20th century golden era of journalism was an illusion. For all the faults of Internet journalism, breaking the monopoly alone was a public service. It's no longer possible for a sitting President to literally expose himself to journalists when he gets annoyed at their questions as Lyndon Johnson once did.
That's a relatively good history, and raises some good points, but leaves out a few elements and gets some timing wrong.
The rise of beat journalism and "modern journalistic standards" came with the arrival of the telephone (early 1920s), and the ability for reporters to, well, phone it in. (The emergence of the telegraph and the news wire had an earlier tremendous impact, though largely on the ability for news to move between cities rapidly, if not always accurately -- I've followed some 1890s stories and noted the discrepencies ranging from misspelled names to misattributed identities: https://redd.it/39w8u4).
Beat reporting permitted these papers to develop people who had expertise. Writer Jacob Riis who's really known for his photographs was also a print reporter who made poverty on the Lower East Side his beat.... [H]e knew everything about what was going on. And so it gave authority to the newspapers. This is also important to the transition that is going on in journalism at that time. Before that journalism was an immature business. It was very partisan, often supported by political parties, and a failed politicians became editors and successful editors became politicians it was two sides of the same coin. But when newspapers established their economic independence by writing copy that people wanted to buy and if people bought a newspaper you could sell pages of advertising. In conjunction with that was enormous technological change. Paper that was strong enough to go through printing presses at incredible speeds. The telegraph delivering news from around the world. And the beat was part of that. It brought news that was reliable to the front page of the newspaper based on some form of expertise.
I'd argue that the two World Wars, particularly the second, also created the institution of the modern paper and news organisation.
Radio was starting to emerge by the 1920s, but was still pretty immature. Television wasn't a force until the 1950s, and only late within that period. Remember that the Kennedy-Nixon debates (1960) were the first time a US presidential debate was covered live. This was also the time of the first satellite links -- and they were part-time, occasional links, not part of broadcast transmission. That technology didn't mature until the late 1990s. NPR's Renee Montaigne discusses how NPR correspondents, especially overseas, would jump through hoops to get tape to the Washington studio over the course of days (and yes, physical tape), particularly from remote locations such as Africa.
As for balance and integrity, Google's Ngram Viewer is a useful tool for exploring the frequency of words and phrases in general usage. The phrase "journalistic integrity" started emerging in the 1960s, growing about fivefold through the early 2000s, at a nearly linear rate. Other related terms ("journalistic balance" and "impartial journalism") are less pronounced.
The terms "corporate media", "left-wing media", "liberal media", and "establishment media" appear about this time -- the first to dominate the latter, with corporate far more prominent than liberal, in Google's corpus.
Stoll has a much more mixed record on that than he's given credit for. Some boners, some accurate predictions.
1. Replacing human teachers is very hard. Look at the whole MOOC space.
2. I'll give him mixed status on books and newspapers. Technologically, it's possible to have electronic books and papers. Some of the displays and devices are pretty good. Almost all the software sucks, and the business models are atrocious. (I'm saying this as someone who's got a few thousand, each, of articles and books on a tablet for research and organisation.) The best business model, from a user perspective, is free content. The content itself is a mess, and I find that older materials (archived books and content at Archive.org, most from 1924 and before), published books (I make heavy use of several pirate book sites for research materials, as well as libraries and more traditional sources), and scientific papers (Sci-Hub) tend to have much higher quality content than all but the very best online sites.
Hal Varian (now Google's chief economist) wrote some quite good essays regarding online content in the late 1990s. While the Web is catching up, his point was that at the time, the Web's not-insubstantial page count was the equivalent of perhaps a modest, and quite poorly-curated, local library, if that. Mind that the business models are still far behind, and I think completely flawed: information is a public good, information access wants to be free.
3. Electronic commerce is a mess. It's consistently underperformed booster's estimates. It comes with terrible compromises of privacy, security, and surveillance. The experience is pathetic (unfortunately it's also frequently made the brick-and-mortar experience pathetic). It's fraud-ridden for both buyers and sellers. Payment processors' practices are capricious.
The Web remains useful for information and communications, it's a poor fit for commerce. Almost all the actual technology is tremendously frustrating, for users, vendors, providers, and engineers (I've worn all hats).
Stoll may have missed a few points, but he hit a number of others smack on the head. That's far better than many "futurists", particularly in even considering downsides and negatives.
You know, he really wasn't wrong. Online news hasn't really replaced newspapers; it's just displaced them.