You might think that we are living in an age in which, more than ever before, ordinary Americans have extraordinary access to information. Say you live in Missoula, Montana and want to read the New York Times each morning — the same morning it’s published. No problem. Same with the Washington Post or almost any other paper. Or say you want to read the entire text of Al Gore’s speech at Constitution Hall — or watch it on video whenever you choose. No problem. Maybe you want to read In re: Sealed Case. Or the Barrett Report. Again, no problem. On television, you can watch the old network newscasts, surf between the three cable news networks, or watch events like the Alito hearings in their entirety on C-SPAN.

Given all that, you might think that, at least as far as news is concerned, we live in a completely different world from the days in which Americans’ access to information was severely limited — a 15-minute network newscast, big newspapers, for those who did not live in New York or Washington, available by mail days or weeks after publication, primary resources nearly impossible to get. The bad old days of one-network (CBS) or one-newspaper (NYT) domination are over. You might think things are immeasurably better now.

But no. In the new issue of the New Yorker (printed on paper and sent to me by mail, no less), Nicholas Lemann, a fine writer who is now dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, writes about Edward R. Murrow and the journalistic world of the 1950s. Discussing the movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” and a book by former NPR anchor Bob Edwards, “Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism,” Lemann writes:

Both Edwards’s book, explicitly, and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” obliquely, make it clear why this is a Murrow season. It looks as if, once again, right-wing politicians are trampling on civil liberties in the name of protecting the country from a terrifying global threat. Commercialism and superficiality seem regnant in broadcast news. Owners avoid controversy, cut budgets, and focus on producing the profits that Wall Street demands — we’re back in the fifties.

Much of the article is devoted to a call for government re-regulation of broadcasting, particularly a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine. That has, of course, been a goal of some liberals since the emergence of Rush Limbaugh. But even a new Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t bring back the mythical Days of Murrow; the doctrine depended on the government’s legal authority to regulate over-the-air broadcasting, which at one time was the whole ball game but is now just one of the ways we get our news (and in the case of network television, a steadily-declining way). The fifties are long, long gone.