They keep talking to "Former Qanon", " Trump voter", "Proud Boy"

[SunSeeker]

24. I was using "press" as a generic term. Fairness Doctrine did apply to TV & radio (broadcast media).

It applied to broadcast licensees. TV now can put a microphone to a RWNJ and is not required to give the other side (i.e. truth) equal time.

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine played a huge role in fomenting the rise of right wing radio and right wing propaganda in general.

A policy of the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1949, the doctrine was based on the notion that the television networks were “public trustees.” Licensed by the federal government, they ought to serve the entire nation, the argument went, by airing competing perspectives on controversial issues. While the policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate, in practice it led networks to avoid employing anchors or reporters with obvious biases and to play most issues down the middle.

Conservatives never liked the rule. As explained by historian Nicole Hemmer, who is also a co-editor of The Washington Post’s historical analysis section, Made by History, an entire generation of conservatives believed that “objectivity” privileged the liberal establishment because the default views of most broadcasters aligned with those of the Democratic Party. Some local radio hosts flouted the rule by taking aggressively conservative stances on air, only to find the courts forcing their stations to provide equal time to the other side of the debate. When one right-wing radio host in Pennsylvania tried to discredit journalist Fred Crook by describing him as a potential communist, among other things, Crook asked for equal airtime. The Red Lion Broadcast Co. denied the request, but Crook took his case all the way to the Supreme Court and prevailed.
...
In 1987, the FCC announced that it would no longer enforce the Fairness Doctrine. The commission deemed that the expansion of cable television technology made old arguments about the “scarcity” of airtime irrelevant and that the doctrine inhibited broadcasters from tackling controversial issues. Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.

Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/17/how-policy-decisions-spawned-todays-hyperpolarized-media/