There's a huge debate going on right now about the role of the media in American politics.
And two of the main questions are: How much is the media to blame for fueling the rise of Donald Trump? And what's the real relationship between Trump and the media?
Nicholas Kristof recently gave his opinion on the matter in the
New York Times.
He explains that, "Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump's rise on the Republican Party's toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us."
It's really not an either/or proposition though, those two things go hand in hand.
The prevalence of right-wing hate rhetoric and the rise of Trump make it clear why, now more than ever, we need to re-instate the Fairness Doctrine and democratize our media.
Between 1949 and 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was a longstanding policy of the Federal Communications Commission that required broadcasters to give air time to controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a fair manner without editorial input from advertisers.
But after the FCC stopped the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1987, broadcast corporations stopped having to worry about broadcasting in the public interest.
Because the main way that stations "programmed in the public interest" was by producing news, real, actual, non-infotainment news, once Reagan lifted that requirement, the news divisions of the various networks came under the sway of ratings and profits.
News was no longer the cost of keeping your broadcast license, instead, it became an opportunity to make more money with increasingly dumbed down and salacious reporting.
Perhaps coincidentally, just a few months after the FCC did away with the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh launched his show, and in the years following, conservative-owned corporations put commentators like Sean Hannity and Michael Savage on stations nationwide, so that listeners could tune in to right wing hate radio from pretty much anywhere in the country at any time of the day or night.
