Have you ever wondered how politics became so partisan?
Is it really a shifting of demographics and values - or has the distance between viewpoints been artificially inflated?
Looking at media today - with its echo chambers and partisan screaming matches - you’d think things have always been this messy. But you’d be wrong. They haven’t.
There was actually a time when broadcasters had to present both sides of controversial issues. It was called the Fairness Doctrine, and when Reagan’s FCC killed it in 1987, they accidentally created the monster we’re dealing with now.
The doctrine wasn’t some politically correct suggestion. It was FCC policy with real teeth. Starting in 1949, the FCC required broadcasters to cover controversial public issues and present contrasting viewpoints. If someone attacked you on air, the station had to notify you within a week, provide transcripts, and give you free response time. Many stations found it easier to air the bare minimum on controversial topics rather than risk expensive fairness fights, according to the FCC.
Only a handful of stations ever lost their licenses over fairness - WXUR in Pennsylvania got shut down in 1973 for broadcasting one-sided fundamentalist programming. But the threat was real enough to keep most broadcasters in line. The Supreme Court backed this up in 1969 with Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, ruling that viewers’ rights trumped broadcasters’ rights because radio spectrum was limited.
Then things changed and Reagan became president. His FCC Chairman Mark Fowler, who famously called television “just another appliance - it’s a toaster with pictures,” believed broadcasters should be marketplace participants, not community trustees. By 1985, the FCC said it was “firmly convinced” the doctrine “disserves the public interest” - and it questioned whether the doctrine was even constitutional. When Congress tried to save it in 1987, passing bills to write it into law by huge margins in both houses, Reagan vetoed the legislation.
The real death blow came on August 4, 1987, when the FCC voted 4-0 to eliminate the doctrine entirely. They argued it “restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters” and “actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues.” What they actually did was open Pandora’s box.
Rush Limbaugh figured out what happened first. About a year after the repeal, he got a deal to give his show to stations nationwide for free - something only possible without the Fairness Doctrine. By 1994, he had 20 million listeners on 650 stations. The explosion was insane: conservative talk radio went from 150 stations in 1987 to over 2,000 by 2013. By 2007, the stations owned by the five biggest radio companies were airing 10 hours of conservative talk for every hour of progressive talk, according to the Center for American Progress.
The content that emerged was beyond toxic. Bob Grant, some radio host in New York, called Black people “savages” and said cops should use machine guns on gay pride parades. Under the old rules, stations would have had to make room for people calling out this garbage. Now they could just let it fly.
Fox News followed the same playbook. Roger Ailes started it for Rupert Murdoch in 1996 after producing Limbaugh’s TV show. Limbaugh had proven there was an audience hungry for partisan rage - Fox just put it on cable with better graphics.
The whole industry consolidated too. Media critic Ben Bagdikian counted 50 companies controlling most American media in 1983 - by 2004, he counted just five. Clear Channel bought over 1,200 radio stations and turned them into cookie-cutter operations. Remember local programming? It died so corporate suits could maximize profits.
The political damage was predictable. Pew Research shows that by 2014, 92% of Republicans positioned themselves to the right of the median Democrat, while 94% of Democrats went left of the median Republican. In 1994, nearly half of Americans had mixed political views. That shared reality just vanished.
Every attempt to bring back the doctrine has failed miserably. Tulsi Gabbard tried in 2019 and got zero co-sponsors. Now everyone’s focused on regulating Facebook and Twitter instead of fixing the original problem.
The irony kills me. Reagan’s people thought they were defending free speech. What they actually did was let the loudest, angriest voices drown out everyone else. They replaced actual diversity with whatever made the most money.
Sure, the doctrine had problems. It was heavy-handed and sometimes made stations nervous about covering anything controversial. But it also meant there were actual standards for what counted as journalism. Without those guardrails, news became entertainment and facts became weapons.
Today’s mess - from talk radio to cable news to social media bubbles - all traces back to that day in 1987 when the FCC decided the free market could police itself. The market delivered exactly what markets always deliver: whatever sells best. Turns out, anger and fear sell really well.
Now, we’re still stuck with the consequences. Every fight about social media censorship and fake news happens in the world Reagan created. A place where we’re actually debating if media should serve democracy or just make money?
The answer should be obvious, but apparently it wasn’t obvious enough to prevent one of the dumbest policy decisions in American history.
Correction, October 7th, 2026: This essay first said only one station ever lost its license under the doctrine and called it WUXR - the station was WXUR, and Mississippi’s WLBT lost its license too. It also put quote marks around words the FCC never used in its 1985 report - the FCC said the doctrine disserves the public interest and questioned whether it was constitutional, but it didn’t rule that it violated free speech rights. It said Limbaugh went national months after the repeal because equal-time rules were gone - it was about a year later, and the rule that ended was the Fairness Doctrine, not the equal-time rule. And it said media ownership shrank to 6 companies by 2005 - media critic Ben Bagdikian counted 5 by 2004.
Update, October 7th, 2026: A few lines now say the doctrine was FCC policy rather than a law, that it asked for contrasting views rather than equal time, that many stations aired the bare minimum on controversial topics, where the 10-to-1 talk radio figure comes from, and that Roger Ailes started Fox News for Rupert Murdoch.