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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

All goes back to Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which gave rise to biased political based news coverage a la Fox News. Since then, political polarization has increased each year until we got to the point we're at where both sides see the other as dangerous and lacking legitimacy. It's a lose-lose downward spiral.

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The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast media. I guess if it still existed it could be amended to include cable but that would be a tough thing to do since cable companies don't lease the public airwaves.

Prior to around ~1990s Fox News (and ABC/CBS) were the mainstream. CNN was a tiny backwater news station that didn't grow to popularity until the 1991 gulf war in which they had by far the best reporting and everyone else was re-broadcasting CNN. CNN is what grew out of the repeal of the fairness doctrine.

Fox News was founded in 1996.

Fox broadcast stations having nightly news, like your local Fox affiliate news at 11 was and remains different.

> All goes back to Reagan's

Spoken by someone who clearly has not read the Powell Memorandum. Reagan was just following the playbook. It's all right there, out in the open. It goes like clockwork because the real backer for both sides -- mega-corporatism -- wants it. The "culture war" conflicts are considered unimportant, as they have no effect at all on the substance.

Trump is the first on his side to step out of line. It will cost them, but maybe not much. The goal now will be to get people distracted again, so the real work of eliminating people's influence may proceed.

> All goes back to Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine

Reagan himself was an FBI informant and was involved with blacklisting so-called Communists way back when he was President of the Screen Actors Guild, during the McCarthy era. So any story that says "It all started on such and such a date" is completely arbitrary.

You can talk about Barry Goldwater. The National Review. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. There was already a strong conservative movement growing that got Reagan elected in the first place. Not to mention the October surprise conspiracy theory of his 1980 election.

The 1960s, the Vietnam War, the civil rights era, these had a huge impact socially, started political realignments, and caused much internal turmoil in the United States.

The Gingrich "Republican Revolution" occurred in 1994. Hillary Clinton claimed there was a vast right-wing conspiracy in 1995. Government shutdowns. Impeachment. Oklahoma City bombing. All of this occurred before Fox News even went on the air.

Will anyone acknowledge that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were radicalized before Fox News existed, not to mention before Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?

Isnt Fairness Doctrine in direct opposition against free speech?

Hardly. The Fairness Doctrine is exactly "the cure for bad speech is more speech".

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine might be useful.

Compelled speech is not free speech.

Bzzt. It's not compelled speech. It's compelled airtime.

Yes, but because the radio used public airways, the courts found that the FCC can regulate them. It’s why you can’t swear on the radio (the FCC says so) despite free speech allowing swearing.

I'd be curious on how this philosophy translates to the internet today. There's lots of public infrastructure that we use, but it's hard to picture surfing the internet or watching Netflix as the same as broadcast television.

So, if the government had nationalized all paper products in the US, and then put strict content standards on newspapers, would the courts (and you) be like, "oh, well, that's not really a violation of the First Amendment, because the public owns the papers"?

I don’t know. I haven’t read the actual rulings from the courts. I’m just saying how things are.

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