Thirty-nine years ago today, the FCC voted 4-0 to kill the Fairness Doctrine, the rule that since 1949 had made broadcasters cover hard issues and give the other side a turn. Reagan had vetoed a bill to save it that June. Nobody was crazy for wanting it gone. A federal office deciding what counts as balanced is a scary thing to build.
So where did everybody go?
Not far, at first. Before Rush Limbaugh went national in 1988, Talkers magazine counted 30 or 40 stations in the country doing talk radio, and plenty weren't political. Limbaugh started on 56 and grew past 600.
Then television noticed.
MSNBC launched in July 1996 with Bill Gates sitting next to Tom Brokaw. To clear the channel for it, NBC took the slot from America's Talking, the cable outfit run by Roger Ailes. He walked out, and three months later Fox News was on the air. Nobody was confused about the plan: pick a side, keep them mad, sell the ads.
Talk radio and cable never pretended to be anything else. The trouble started when conventional newsrooms saw the money and copied the business model.
Watch the coverage the next time a data center fight or a school levy comes up in your township. Count how many stories give you the other side at the same length, in the same piece, instead of a quote at the bottom. You won't need many fingers.
We've done it too. Our first Grove City piece in June ran off the campaign's summary of its own amendment, because the certified petition wasn't filed yet. When we finally read the filed text, it said things the summary didn't.
Which brings us to where the audience actually ended up.
Joe Rogan has been No. 1 on Edison Research's podcast list since 2019, and he was first again in the numbers out July 17. He is not a reporter. He doesn't prepare like one; he lets guests run when he shouldn't, and plenty of what leaves that studio would not survive a fact-checker.
He does one thing, though, that most of us quit doing. He lets people finish.
That isn't the same as being fair, and it's worth saying so. Rogan often agrees with his guests. But nobody can be fair in 90 seconds. Time is what fairness needs, and 39 years after we decided the government shouldn't require it, hardly anyone spends much of it.
Two things we'd ask of Ohio newsrooms, this one first.
Give it the time. Wait for the document instead of the summary. If an interview is good for 40 minutes, don't cut it to a clip and a pull quote.
Put the argument inside the story. Not in a follow-up nobody reads. If two people see it differently, let the reader meet both of them, at the same length, on the same day.
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