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Short answer: after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes/Fox News found a profitable strategy in focusing on a specific demogr
by GavinMcG 6y ago
Short answer: after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes/Fox News found a profitable strategy in focusing on a specific demographic and telling them what they want to hear. Fox led the way, and the polarized template took off with Crossfire (on CNN) and further self-sorting by audiences.
(This was content in the embedded video—gestured at in the text.)
- tjs8rj 6y agoI’ve heard the argument on the right that the fairness doctrine was in name only, as in it gave the news media monopolistic power while they showed a skewed perspective of what the other side actually believed. Consequently, Rush Limbaugh grow so big so quickly because someone was finally representing this audience
- willis936 6y agoWe are all eventually in service to the truth. Misinformation can cause real damage. A surge of misinformation calls for more aggressive appeals to free speech to keep society stable. What would have protected free speech in the first place? Not allowing the dangerous fantasies supplant fact.
- wincy 6y agoDangerous fantasies like “thalidomide is perfectly safe” or “smoking is good for your health”? How about “fat makes you fat”? There’s plenty of statements that the mainstream media supported that were either flat out wrong and harmful to the American public. We’re still feeling the repercussions of a government hellbent against saturated fats. At least allowing people to indulge in “dangerous fantasies” lets some of the people be right some of the time, instead of the entire monoculture being dangerously wrong.
- tayo42 6y agoNot all misinformation is the same, there's a difference between science got it wrong and society eventually corrected it self and being wrong on purpose or misleading to pander to an audience.
- Fellshard 6y agoYou are a wiser person than I if you can tell the difference while it's happening.
- tayo42 6y agoMaybe I am lol, but thats not important. I think it's fairly easy to differentiate people trying their best from bullshit peddlers. Look at the recent controversial topics vaccines, global warming, masks. Is it really unclear to see who is putting in a genuine effort?
- Fellshard 6y agoI think personal biases (especially confirmation bias) usually end up interfering /strongly/ in these kinds of topics.
- anigbrowl 6y agoIronically Rush Limbaugh did very well out of disputing any link between smoking and lung cancer. I was mightily amused that it was the latter which carries him off.
- refurb 6y agoAnd “thalidomide causes birth defects” was no doubt “misinformation” early in the crisis as well. You’d be suppressing that too.
- inglor_cz 6y ago"Dangerous fantasies" are a mixed bunch. Once upon a time, emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage were dangerous fantasies. In China as of today, democratic ideas are a dangerous fantasy. It is not as if contemporary West is the only society in history that has everything figured out and can only get worse through entertainment of "dangerous fantasies". To the watchers of status quo, every potential change is at least suspect, if not outright dangerous.
- hobs 6y agoIn America today, the dangerous fantasy is that voting is not safe, the election was stolen, and that we need an armed uprising to manage that. So, do you think those ideas deserve to be held up next things like suffrage or the abolishing of slavery? Please, no.
- BBC-vs-neolibs 6y agoA deeper problem is that many consider voting broken by definition, unless their team wins. Because the opposition has been "corrupted" and "fooled", their dissent is not legitimate. They see the ballot box strictly as a utilitarian tool, which when it does not give the God Given outcome, can rightly be followed up by the ammo box. Because the opposition is wrong and dangerous to this country.
- fancyfish 6y agoYou’re right - section 3 very purposefully doesn’t set guidelines for what’s “fair” so you get many liberal outlets presenting just right-of-center as the opposing viewpoint. In many ways it accelerated Limbaugh et al because viewers could see they weren’t getting an accurate conservative viewpoint in the mainstream and thus trusted it less, leading to other outlets.
- teawrecks 6y agoIn other words, people who wanted their bad faith arguments represented in a world of mostly good faith journalism got their way. "Mostly" because obviously there have always been journalists who were clearly disingenuous, but they took the hit to their reputation in kind. Reputation is barely a thing worth caring about anymore. Everyone takes a hit to their rep no matter what they say, so now they just focus on raking in advertising dollars.
- lettergram 6y agoThe issue with the "fairness doctrine" is what is fair? Why is free speech curtailed? I'm not saying anything was good vs bad, but it's clear why it was a perceived an issue. One political party was taking advantage to revoke the speech of another. Put simply, I could put two left leaning people on my show, but claim one was "conservative" and that was "fair". Honestly, it's no better than now, but at least we all know the truth.
- nostromo 6y agoFox didn’t create a biased media, which existed long before Fox News did, they responded to it. Most surveys going back decades and decades show that 80 or 90%+ of journalists are registered Democrats. That doesn’t make them bad journalists, but they are a monoculture that doesn’t represent the diversity of political views in America. It’s notable how it really bothers people that there is one right-leaning news network out of a dozen or so left-leaning networks. Apparently it’s not enough to control 90% of the media narrative - it has to be 100%.
- cycomanic 6y agoFrom a European perspective there's one bonkers network that is nothing but a billionaire's propaganda outlet and many conservative to rightwing networks. Actually, how crazy the situation is, is shown how "conservatives" abandoned Fox News because they did not reflect their reality distortion and moved to even more extreme outlets (I mean who can call newsmax or OAN even news). If someone moved from Fox News to OAN, they were never interested in news, they were after someone feeding their prejudice no matter how unreal they are.
- KirbyTetro 6y agoWhich European country would that perspective be from? The UK, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary?
- cycomanic 6y agoGermany/Sweden but talking to friends people from France and Spain as well as the other Scandinavian countries think the same.
- BeFlatXIII 6y agoIt would be healthier if there were competing right-leaning networks. A lot of the problems with Fox stem from the fact that they have close to 100% of the conservative audience. The various left-leaning networks have other left-leaning networks to keep each other in check. There is no similar pushback for Fox.
- inglor_cz 6y agoThe nostalgic pining for the fairness doctrine that you so often see at Reddit and sometimes even here slightly reminds me of European monarchist movements that idolize the golden times of royal rule. Both seem to ignore the fact that whatever worked in year X will not work in year X+50, because the society, technology and politics moved on. One of the defining movements of the last hundred years was the fact that the cost of disseminating opinions and news was slowly becoming affordable for more and more corporations, small teams or even individuals. Thanks to technological progress, the voices out there multiplied, as did their audience. And people unhappy with a certain journalistic narrative found it cheaper and easier to broadcast their competing perspective. Such a chaotic world cannot be subject to effective content guidelines such as the defunct fairness doctrine, just like the modern world of highly educated professionals cannot be ruled by hereditary nobility.
- specialist 6y agoEliminating the Fairness Doctrine left only Pay to Play. Broadcast content moderation simply shifted further towards advertisers. Instead of censorship, Capital simply hoarded all the bandwidth, starving alternative voices of attention. How now are us newly ennobled modern highly educated professionals supposed to hear voices which no longer exist? The hysterical bit is social media swiped the control away from advertisers. We've replaced your dreaded hereditary nobility with the mythical meritocracy.
- hikingsimulator 6y agoI find your comparison rather dubious and far-fetched. That aside, it's not because there is a higher diversity of sources at more diverse scales tosay that the answer is not to look at what worked in the past. Or to simply throw one's hands in the air. It is not because small ISPs, tech companies, etc. exist that the large conglomerates that impact our daily lives should be left untouched and unregulated. Same goes with news, or masquerades of news. A good start for instance would to untie news media from the profit motive. NPR exists, the French Radio Publique exists, etc. and they output great content, independently more often than not. It shows that public investment into newsmaking is worthwhile and has often a better quality to it. News reporting should be seen as of public interest, and treated as such rather than as a commodity. Breaking news conglomerates should also be explored.
- hash872 6y agoThe fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast TV, never cable. This is a myth that will never ever die and I see repeated constantly, even though it's been debunked numerous times by Snopes and others. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-fairness-doctrine/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ronald-reagan-fairness-doc... The fairness doctrine was also abused by multiple administrations to go after broadcasters who were overly critical of them- FDR did it, so did Kennedy, Nixon, etc. The government is not and should never be the arbiter of what's 'true' or 'fair'. I'm always amazed that it never occurs to people that the gov't might use this power in bad faith, yes? But no, the fairness doctrine has nothing to do with Fox News, it never applied to cable
- GavinMcG 6y agoIt absolutely had to do with Fox News by way of Rush Limbaugh. The fairness doctrine applied to broadcast radio as well as television, and the next year after its abolition, the Rush Limbaugh Show began airing. His meteoric rise over the next couple years demonstrated a large market for conservative media, which motivated Murdoch's and Ailes's approach in founding Fox.
- anigbrowl 6y agoThis did happen after the revocation of the fairness doctrine, but another angle to consider is that the US nominally won the Cold War when the USSr disintegrated, and reactionaries like Limbaugh and Ailes then rose to popularity by identifying and villifying An Enemy Within.
- notafraudster 6y agoCrossfire (1982) actually substantially predates FOX News (1996)... and I also don't think it materially changed in how it framed debates after the FD erosion in the mid-80s. I do agree that the FD revocation leads directly to FOX News and AM talk radio, I just don't think CNN or Crossfire are examples of the phenomenon being discussed. I think people mention Crossfire largely in the context of Jon Stewart criticizing the Tucker Carlson era iteration, which fair cop was bad, and also coincided with an era where CNN phased out real news journalists like Aaron Brown in favour of more idiot talking heads. But I'm just not sure you can draw the causal graph from fairness doctrine to those events ~18-ish years later the same way you can to the rise of talk radio a few years after FD was sunset and FOX News 5 or 6 years after that.
- will4274 6y agoThe fairness doctrine was solution to a monopolist problem - there were only 6 TV stations (because broadcast frequency was limited and broadcasting expensive). It also didn't work that well - stations gave lip service to fairness by representing opposing views badly. Most people don't watch TV anymore and cable has hundreds of channels. It's hard to see how the fairness doctrine would be relevant on the internet, with tens of thousands of providers, and without similar monopoly-producing conditions.
- bazooka_penguin 6y agoI find it ironic this post presents "fake news" as fact