Robert F. Kennedy Jr: Fox News Has Divided Country In A Way Not Seen Since Civil War

[liberalmike27]

42. Fairness Doctrine

FOX was created because of an earlier decision in 1987, to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. You once had to watch an hour of one guy, with an hour of another, one conservative, the other liberal. Better, most of the time they were both on at the same time, exchanging ideas.

This kept people from being able to watch just one, or the other. Everyone at least got whatever was considered liberal and conservative, no matter which station they watched.

Now, with the repeal of the need for the rich-man's media to bother with fairness, it allowed Rush, and FOX to spring up, Demons from the Earth in the late 1980s, early 1990s. In fact, with FOX leading the right-wing push, the rest of the networks pretty much followed, throughout the 1990s, into the 2000s, when finally ONE guy came on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann. They followed that model, and mopped up people like me, people who had completely abandoned the ridiculous right.

They paraded on one person after another to call the media "liberal." Then they proceeded to put on the most vacuous, bilious stuff, the most right-wing ideas, with no one there to counter their myth that they were liberal, or the positions presented by this new right-wing corporate media.

If we ever want to fix our media, it's going to involve some sort of attempt at righting this divide. Commercial radio still has roughly 97 percent right-wing talk, and liberals are still regularly being removed, or having sports substituted, even when they are getting good ratings, and on markets where sports stations already abound.