Today’s highly fragmented and ideologically riven media landscape has resulted from the interplay of technological innovation and legal deregulation.
In important measure, we owe the rise of conservative media and the subsequent spread of conspiracy theories on a mass scale to changes in rules and developments in technology.
Once upon a time, when I was child, on any given evening, more than 4 in 10 Americans, and a larger share of voters, gathered around three evening network news broadcasts.
While some thought CBS a little more liberal and NBC a touch more conservative, having watched hundreds of hours of them in graduate school, I can safely say they were homogeneous.
Unlike today, when the word “bias” is rarely far from “media,” CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite was the most trusted person in the country. Now, fewer than 17 percent watch one of those evening broadcasts.
How did it happen?
Technological changes are easy to trace.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to appear on a television screen, but prior to 1947 only a few thousand U.S. homes housed TV sets.
By the early 1960s, more than 90 percent of American households owned a television.
Cable TV made its debut in 1949. But, heavily regulated at the behest of TV station owners, it made modest progress until the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened restrictions beginning in the early 1970s.
Pat Robertson launched his Christian Broadcast Network in 1976, while Ted Turner originated CNN in 1980.
By the mid-1990s, some two-thirds of American households were cable subscribers.
The latest major technological changes brought social media and streaming, which arrived in the mid-1990s but required the higher data speeds and lower broadband costs that came a decade later to achieve mass followings. Podcasting followed around 2000.
Today, about 85 percent of households subscribe to at least one streaming service, and a year ago, streaming overtook both broadcast and cable. About three-quarters of Americans are on some social media platform, and last year, about 4 in 10 listened to a podcast in the previous month.
Technology and legal regulation first stunted cable, while changes in both allowed it to explode. Growth in streaming, social media and podcasting has been driven more by technology than (de)regulation.
However, another key factor in the growth of conservative media was the demise of the Fairness Doctrine.
In the beginning, the FCC regarded the airwaves as a limited public trust, which therefore needed regulation. A 1941 ruling – the Mayflower decision – required stations to remain neutral in news and politics, prohibiting them from giving editorial support to any candidate or political viewpoint.
By 1949, that position evolved into the Fairness Doctrine, which required those using the public airwaves to fairly represent both sides of controversies.
The easiest way to ensure that kind of fairness was to avoid controversy altogether, which accounted for the homogeneity and just-the-facts approach of those now ancient network news shows.
But by repealing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC opened the airwaves to highly partisan, factually flimsy, one-sided broadcasting.
Just months later, a Sacramento radio host with strongly conservative views came to New York and launched “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” His conservative news-as-entertainment approach found a large audience, fostering imitators.
In 1975, there were 130 news talk radio stations in the country; by 1995, after the Fairness Doctrine’s end, there were nearly 10 times as many (1,250), about half of which carried Limbaugh’s show.
Rush and his imitators created an audience for Fox News, which turned on its cameras in 1996. Since then, occasional efforts to restore the Fairness Doctrine materialized, but just as one can’t put technological genies back in the bottle, legal genies can also be difficult to wrestle back into their containers.
The Fairness Doctrine addressed a world where news and information were scarce. On TV, it came from just three networks.
Today, the problem is not scarcity but abundance. Anyone can choose to be a “news source” and find a platform through which to propagate their views; and anyone can choose to believe them.
Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, a member of the Association’s Hall of Fame, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.