The Illusion of Order: When Newspapers Looked Clean, Crisp, and Pure

Part 1 of The Laundry Basket of Media & Entropy

Every house has one: the laundry basket. The great domestic leveller. The quiet, unassuming monument to the fact that no matter how often you empty it, it fills up again. It never apologises. It never explains. It simply accumulates.

If you want a dependable metaphor for human communication, society, history, and the modern media ecosystem, forget the political textbooks — the laundry basket will do nicely.

For all our talk of order, objectivity, and control, the truth is painfully simple:
media — like laundry — never stays sorted for long.

Every generation insists it’s living through unprecedented chaos. Every generation swears the people before them enjoyed clarity, calm, and a better class of headline. It’s nonsense, of course. The only thing that’s changed is the fabric softener.

Old newspapers looked tidy and authoritative. They felt pressed and purified. A white shirt straight off the ironing board. And because there were so few channels — and so few people controlling them — the whole thing gave off an air of stability.

But stability is often just good lighting.

The Whites: When Media Looked Immaculate

Before the internet — before social media, smartphones, 24/7 news cycles, and billionaires sending rockets into the wrong parts of space — there was the morning paper. Folded. Ordered. Final. A single front page for the entire nation.

People remember this era with the kind of nostalgic glow usually reserved for childhood summers. “Back then,” they say, “the media was serious. Responsible. Trustworthy. A pillar of democracy.”

Let’s not get carried away.

Yes, the papers looked immaculate.
Yes, the headlines were coherent.
Yes, there was a comforting predictability to the morning ritual.

But the order was an illusion, not a virtue.

The old media world worked like this:

• A tiny number of privately owned publishing houses controlled the presses.

• A handful of moguls decided what mattered.

• Political alliances and commercial pressures shaped the “neutral truth.”

• Regulation was light, if it existed at all.

• The public, lacking alternatives, accepted the product as gospel.

The whites looked clean because nobody else was allowed near the washing machine.

A newspaper felt authoritative because it felt like the whole world.
In reality, it reflected the worldview of a select few who controlled the tools.

And yet… for all its flaws, old media did offer something we’ve since lost:

a shared narrative.

A nation reading the same front page.
A society arguing — or agreeing — over a single set of headlines.
A sense of collective reference.

It wasn’t democratic.
But it was unified.

Today, we confuse that unity with truth.
But it was simply a consequence of scarcity: fewer channels, fewer voices, fewer options.

Of course it looked tidy.
Scarcity always looks like discipline.

And once the whites were washed, well… the colours were waiting.

Reflection

The point of revisiting this older media landscape isn’t to romanticise it or condemn it, but to understand the illusion at its core. Order was never the natural state of communication — it was the by-product of narrow pipes and concentrated power. As soon as the pipes widened, the laundry basket began filling with colour, noise, and new textures.

Understanding that simple fact helps us stop longing for a past that never truly existed, and prepares us to make sense of the chaos that came next.

Next: PART 2 — The Colours