Written Insight: The Problem with the Media #6 - A Brief History of Bias

So we'll use one branch of legacy media as an example to share a brief history of how it became so biased towards regression. As we'll say this is the branch that is possibly the most biased, which has been AM squak hate radio. And we'll make what should be an obvious statement, which is that we support the official narrative of World War II and those who don't, speak in code in support of The Third Reich.

Modern talk radio as a major force in America started in 1926, when Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves. By the mid-1930s, as many as a full third of the entire nation listened to his weekly broadcasts. His downfall, and the end of the talk radio era he'd both created and dominated, came in the early 1940s when the nation was at war and Hitler was shipping millions of Jews to the death camps. Coughlin launched into hard-right anti-Semitic tirades in his broadcasts, blaming an international Jewish conspiracy for communism, the Great Depression, World War II, and most of the world's other ills. His sudden shift to very extreme politics, as he supported and lauded Hitler and Mousolini before the camps in Europe were revealed, eventually disgusted the majority of his listeners, and he retired from radio to return to his parish duties where he died in relative obscurity.

Between 1949 and 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was a longstanding policy of the Federal Communications Commission that required broadcasters to give airtime to controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a fair manner without editorial input from advertisers. Many say the Fairness Doctrine came about partially in part because of Coughlin's dark decline. There was a forward thinker and talker on radio for years named Alan Berg who sought to bring balance to America's airwaves, speaking more to a middle class and thus pro-democratic flavoring, and did so while honoring the doctrine while being fabulously popular, no problem. But like the Bill Hicks joke “Do you ever realize that we live in a world where good men are murdered, while mediocre hacks thrive? John Kennedy, murdered. Gandhi, murdered. Martin Luther King, murdered. Reagan, wounded” Berg was machine-gunned to death by extreme reactionaries likely from the Aryan Nation.

But after the FCC stopped the Fairness Doctrine under that reincarnation of Satan in 1987, broadcast corporations stopped having to worry about broadcasting in the public interest. So the now red cult figured out 40+ years ago, since the elimination of the fairness doctrine, it was all about turning the media into something that was impartial into something that was partial. Because the main way that stations "programmed in the public interest" was by producing news, real, actual, journalistic, non-infotainment news. Once Alzheimer's brain lifted that requirement, news was no longer the cost of keeping your broadcast license, instead, the news divisions of the various networks came under the sway of ratings and profits so it became an opportunity to make more money with increasingly dumbed down and salacious reporting.

Not coincidentally, just a few months after the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine, another ghoul whose surely rotting in the fires of hell for all of eternity, Rush Limbaugh launched his show, and in the years following, regressive reactionaries hiding under the label of "conservatism" put propagandists like him on stations nationwide, so that listeners could tune in to hate radio from pretty much anywhere in the country at any time of the day or night. And, station managers discovered, there was a loyal group of radio listeners who embraced Rush's brand of overt hard-regressive spin, believing every word he said even though he himself acknowledge he wasnt a journalist and claimed the show was "just entertainment" to avoid a reemergence of the Fairness Doctrine. The success of Rush led local radio station programmers to look for more of the same: there was a sudden demand for Rush-clone talkers who could meet the needs of the nation's Rush-bonded brain drained listeners, and the all-right-wing-talk radio format emerged, dominated by Limbaugh and Limbaugh-clones in both style and political viewpoint.

This was given a huge boost by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under the Clinton administration, a regressive lite corporate democrat, as well as a few other smaller laws and changes in FCC policy, that let a small handful of mega corpses to buy up all the radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in communities from coast to coast - hence the consolidation we've previously mentioned in this series. The vast majority of those radio stations were then programmed with hyper-corporate-friendly radio which speaks only for the rich and their needs while distracting through misdirection. Since modern American regressive reactionary policies only speak for 1% of the population, how do they get dirt poor Appalachian coal miners to vote for robber baron weasels? Through constant lies on the radio... In rural areas where people regularly drive long distances just for routine things like shopping, radio has been and still is incredibly important. And without the Fairness Doctrine and ownership rules in place, other broadcasters started to be more concerned about their bottom lines, instead of the public interest. One of the main reasons the GOP, now the GQP, has even historically had a chance in congressional elections with such historically unpopular regressive policies is that in low-population rural states the only voices on the radio promote regressive politics. As previously mentioned, there have historically been over 1500 regressive rightwing only commercial radio stations, and around 900 imperial religious nonprofit stations, almost all blasting out a pro-reactionary regressive message 24/7.

Into the 2020's this pattern continues. Regressive-aligned businessmen have bought over 300 Spanish-language radio stations across the country and put on them wrong wing Spanish-language hosts to try and bend the Hispanic vote away from the democratic and toward the authoritarian. The domination of talk radio by the fringe hard-right that represents the political views of only a small segment of America has resulted in decades of talk radio stations across the nation never running even an occasional centrist let alone progressive show in the midst of their all-right, all-the-time programming day but instead blasting out fringe hard-regressive squak that represents the political views of only the robber baron class, because corrupt reactionaries and their investors were the first to the market with a consistent and predictable programming slant.

*A disclaimer regarding our multiple references to hell in this insight... of course we don't actually think hell is a real thing. Heaven and hell are marketing fictions created by religion to sway, guilt, and control.