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In 1987, the Reagan administration achieved a long-sought goal of the American right: It won the war against fairness in broadcasting.

For decades, the Fairness Doctrine had required broadcast licensees to offer balance in the presentation of controversial matters of interest to the community. The requirement coincided with a time when the public generally trusted the media and believed what they saw on television or read in the papers.

Historian Jill Lepore, in “These Truths: a History of the United States,” notes, “During the reign of broadcast television, between 1950 and 1980, when there were only three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, polarization was the lowest it had ever been, both before and since.”

Low polarization or not, conservatives were restive.

According to Lepore, “In the 1950s and 1960s, conservatism itself had been controversial, conservatives pointed out, leaving them at a disadvantage under a regime that misrepresented itself as valuing ‘fairness.’”

Heather Hendershot, in “When the News Broke,” points to where she sees the start of a shift in public attitudes — the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

Following Chicago, the timbre of viewer mail changed. Before, critical letters to the news divisions tended to finger specific reporting for misinterpretations or factual errors. Viewers also objected to stories that they thought included excessive violence or sexuality, or inappropriate language. … Following the convention, more and more viewers wrote to Cronkite to say not “This story was biased” but, more trenchantly and personally, “You are biased.” Personal credibility became increasingly central to reactions against network coverage; this focus on individuals would become more and more common in the ensuing decades.

The Nixon administration leaned into the nascent shift. Vice President Spiro Agnew, speaking in November 1969 to a regional GOP conference, excoriated “this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every Presidential address, but, more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues in our nation.”

Agnew went on:

The American people would rightly not tolerate this concentration of power in Government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by Government? The views of a — the majority of this fraternity do not — and I repeat, not — represent the views of America.

Broadcasters, unsurprisingly, cried foul. But conservatives kept up the drumbeat.

Around the time of Agnew’s speech, some 70 percent of the public had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media, according to Gallup. This year, the figure stands at 28 percent — and only eight percent of Republicans.

When the FCC voted to abolish the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, its advocates argued that the market would ensure a diversity of voices. Democrats in Congress protested, and tried to enact the doctrine into law. The effort failed in the face of a veto threat by President Reagan.

Fairness is not just a doctrine; it is a public value. The FCC decided that value could be left to the market. But markets are not obligated to protect democracy.

As Jill Lepore writes:

The repeal meant that broadcasters, operating with federal licenses, had no obligation either to dedicate programming to the public interest or to represent opposing points of view. Along with the creation of national toll-free telephone numbers and the opening of the FM band — which meant that music stations largely abandoned AM, opening those stations for other programming — the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made possible a new kind of conservative talk radio. In 1987, there were some 240 talk radio stations in the country; by 1992, there were 900.

A quote buried in the New York Times story on the FCC decision offered a clue of things to come:

[FCC General Counsel Diane S. Killory] suggested that the demise of the fairness doctrine did appear to threaten two other rules, one governing personal attacks and another political editorials.

The first states that if someone’s character is attacked during a discussion of a controversial issue, the station must offer him a reasonable opportunity to respond. Under the latter rule, a station taking an editorial position against a candidate for public office must notify him and also provide a chance to reply.

The legal standing of those rules is now “questionable,” Ms. Killory said, because they may be deemed to derive from the fairness doctrine itself.

Liam Scott, writing earlier this year for Poynter, describes what came next:

Its repeal was felt widely and swiftly — most prominently through “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” which was nationally syndicated from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021.

“Limbaugh was birthed from repealing the Fairness Doctrine,” Zarkin [Kim Zarkin, a professor of communication at Westminster University in Utah who has researched the FCC for three decades] said. A show like Limbaugh’s — aggressively right-wing and often responsible for spreading falsehoods and conspiracy theories — would never have been possible in a world in which the Fairness Doctrine still reigned.

To Zarkin, his show set the stage for the polarized media environment now gripping the United States, where even basic facts can be fodder for disagreement. “I don’t know that in ’87 people could have predicted where we are now,” she said.

The broader boom in right-wing talk radio — personalities like Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North — was likewise facilitated by the end of the Fairness Doctrine.

In 1996, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched the Fox News Channel with the mantra “fair and balanced” — as opposed to the mainstream, “liberal media.”

As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, Fox is not in the business of fair and balanced. She points to a new piece by G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers. Richardson writes:

Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”

This is the market at work.

In 2016, the market responded to the candidacy of Donald Trump. His circus-like campaign drew eyeballs and clicks. As CBS Chairman Les Moonves said at the time, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” Moonves said. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

And, indeed, Donald has kept going.