Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.
Whats happening is decades of bubbles neatly sorted by Reagan beginning to hurst at capacity. This is what happens when you allow media to capture specific audiences and muse to them endlessly on a single bias. This is what happens when you stop forcing people to cover news on all sides. They pick a side and divide the populace. None of this is surprising, or even hard to understand. There are no adults in the room, there never were.
This is also what happens when news outlets are owned by a handful of giant corporations or billionaires.
Reagan did no one any favors. But he didn’t start it. It was going on before he was born. What fox news, Alex Jones, Q, etc do isn’t new in any way beyond the mediums. Alex Jones is hardly significantly different from Julius Streicher from the early 20th century. And even he was continuing a tradition.
The FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine under him. Which is what I am going off of but yes you are correct. Corpos have always been pieces of shit trying to manipulate the population for their own profit.
Yeah repeal of the fairness doctrine didn’t help. But it was such a small thing in the scheme of things. Dwarfed by the damages that Reagan and Clinton both caused by reducing restrictions on ownership. Among others.
Not clear that the Fairness Doctrine would have changed anything. It only applied to FCC licensees - OTA broadcast, not cable - and it’s really the cable news channels and their need to find 24/7 content that’s drowned us in shallow, emotional drama-content.