"You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper."

Source : Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence and miscellanies from the papers of Thomas Jefferson”, p.343

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