This makes no mention of the repeal of the fairness doctrine nor the shift in financial model for major newspapers. The 1987 abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine led very directly to Rush Limbaugh gaining a national political audience.
The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.[1] In 1987, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine,[2] prompting some to urge its reintroduction through either Commission policy or congressional legislation.[3] The FCC removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.[4]
Rush Limbaugh used to be a regular music DJ in the 1970s. His political talk show was distributed nationally in 1988, soon after the cessation of Fairness Doctrine support by the Reagan administration. Carl McIntire was the Rush Limbaugh (maybe a little more Glenn Beck) of the 1960s and had his radio talk show shut down by the Fairness Doctrine after years of litigation. The legal challenges the Fairness Doctrine presented to McIntire prevented imitators, at least until the abolishment paved the way for Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, etc.
But over the last ten years the division has accelerated largely due to left outlets adopting a similar bias after switching financial models in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Former editorial page editor for the NYT James Bennet explains the shift here:
It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period.
Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.
Consider the graph below, which displays the usage of the terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from (depending on the publication) 1970 through 2019.
This makes no mention of the repeal of the fairness doctrine nor the shift in financial model for major newspapers. The 1987 abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine led very directly to Rush Limbaugh gaining a national political audience.
Rush Limbaugh used to be a regular music DJ in the 1970s. His political talk show was distributed nationally in 1988, soon after the cessation of Fairness Doctrine support by the Reagan administration. Carl McIntire was the Rush Limbaugh (maybe a little more Glenn Beck) of the 1960s and had his radio talk show shut down by the Fairness Doctrine after years of litigation. The legal challenges the Fairness Doctrine presented to McIntire prevented imitators, at least until the abolishment paved the way for Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, etc.
But over the last ten years the division has accelerated largely due to left outlets adopting a similar bias after switching financial models in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Former editorial page editor for the NYT James Bennet explains the shift here:
This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period.
Yes, the article has awesome graphs.