4 Jan 2024 11:10 am
RebelGator » 03 Jan 2024, 2:19 pm » wrote: ↑ Democrats are all about hoaxes, censorship, and lies......it's plain to see you are clueless about the Fairness Doctrine which was a thinly veiled attempt at subsidizing the failing liberal presence on AM radio.
Yes, the idea that the Democratic Party is, for example, a pro-labor party is a lie in itself. Biden's signing of the bill that blocked railroad workers from striking in 2022 is enough to prove that. Biden's anit-labor position also begs the question of why right-wingers dislike him.
It's plain to see you are clueless about the Fairness Doctrine, which was a thinly veiled attempt at subsidizing the failing liberal presence on AM radio.
The Fairness Doctrine was created in the public interest to counter NBC's, CBS's, and ABC's monopoly television audiences. And it is challenging to imagine that any aspect of the most popular form of communication in 1949 that of AM Radio needed to be "subsidized." Indeed, the Fairness Doctrine was harnessed to affect radio in the early 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations used it to counter the monopolization efforts of their opponents.
Instead, eliminating the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the passage of 1996's Telecommunications Act paved the way for the Right's near-total monopolization of AM talk radio. Ergo, if anything, it was the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine that significantly bolstered right-wing "hate radio." That is why it is now possible to drive hundreds of miles throughout the midwestern and southeastern U.S. and hear nothing but right-wing talk radio on one's AM radio.
Moreover, the Clinton administration's Telecommunication Act of 1996 has served to consolidate ownership of AM and FM radio into the hands of a handful of corporations. Two mega-corporations, Clear Channel and iHeartMedia, currently own 2,072 AM and FM stations in nearly each of the 287 radio markets in the U.S. That reality begs the question of why political reactionaries dislike Bill Clinton when, for example, he paved the way for "hate radio's" near-monopolization of the airwaves.
Finally, since the Fairness Doctrine served progressive/working-class interests, its dismantlement served the material interests of Clear Channel, iHeartMedia, Viacom, and a very few others since, overall, the interests of corporations are not the interests of workers. However, since virtually all political reactionaries are workers, one should question why working-class right-wingers cheered the Fairness Doctrine's demise.