There's about to be a big shake up in media.
Back in 1987, Ronald Reagan repealed the FCC's "Fairness Doctrine," a rule that'd been on the books since 1949. It was a rule that was supposed to make broadcasting stations of all varieties balanced in terms of political voices, but in reality it made suppression of right-leaning voices very easy. Reagan torpedoed this rule, and as soon as he did, Rush Limbaugh arrived on the scene, causing the explosion of conservative radio. Democrats spent years attempting to re-establish the Fairness Doctrine to shut him up, never succeeding.
Reagan's FCC effectively changed the narrative landscape for the better, allowing the right to blow holes in the left's narratives.
Fast-forward to today, and Donald Trump is about to hit the FCC with a bomb that could swing the door wide open for more conservative voices to join the big stage, and force the left's grip on broadcasting to loosen. Moreover, it's got the left none too happy.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Trump's FCC chair, Brendan Carr, is about to shake up the department in a way that may forever damage the left's narrative creation capabilities, and as indicated by THR's reporting, the left is attempting to scare people. Take this paragraph, for instance:
“I think Brendan Carr’s objective is not unlike Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary,” says Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, a long-standing D.C. progressive group focused on media-regulation reform. “There’s a much broader play to quash the independence of media systems.” Such efforts are working, she says, citing ABC News’ recent payment of $15 million to settle a libel lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and reports she’s gotten of local news stations backing off Trump stories after getting letters from Carr.
The article spends quite a bit of time trying to convince the reader that what Carr is doing is antithetical to free speech, even giving readers a leader to follow in FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, a woman they're trying to pass off as the conscience of the FCC:
FCC commissioner Anna Gomez has become the agency’s Democratic voice of resistance, Chris Murphy to Carr’s Trump, even as her ultimate impact is similarly unclear. “Stoking partisan culture wars is not the FCC’s job,” she volleyed when the Comcast inquiry began. She also said that “we cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press” when all those complaints were reinstated.
In truth, what Carr is doing is something the left has been trying to stop for ages, and that's ideological competition.
As my colleague Jennifer O' Connell wrote earlier in March, Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative is a plan to deregulate the FCC in order to make it easier for smaller conservative voices to find their footing and grow:
Under President Trump's leadership, the Administration is unleashing a new wave of economic opportunity by ending the regulatory onslaught from Washington. For too long, administrative agencies have added new regulatory requirements in excess of their authority or kept lawful regulations in place long after their shelf life had expired. This only creates headwinds and slows down our country's innovators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. The FCC is committed to ending all of the regulations that are no longer necessary. And we welcome the public's participation and feedback throughout this process.
The Democrats weaponized the FCC for years to gatekeep broadcasting, keeping conservatives in a small, easily containable corner of the public conscience by utilizing various rules and regulations. Caps on baud rates kept stations in the dark while left-leaning stations like NPR and mainstream networks didn't have that limit on their signals. Rules on "misinformation" and "hate speech" allowed the leftist FCC to strip broadcasters of their licenses, forcing stations to watch what they say about given topics. Stations like OANN and Newsmax were consistently investigated for both, while MSNBC and CNN suffered no such investigations despite demonstrable lies about various topics like the Trump/Russia hoax.
Moreover, there were strict limits on how many stations an entity could own, and approval for acquisition had to go through the FCC. It was more than happy to let mega-corporations like Disney purchase 20th Century Fox, but when Sinclair tried to buy Tribune Media, the FCC killed the deal.
Carr's initiative will go through the FCC's regulations line by line and delete, delete, delete, until it's far easier for conservatives to thrive in the broadcast atmosphere.
I've been saying that the internet is choking the media, with internet denizens and influencers becoming the new way for people to get their news, and that's still true. However, one of the things that's been killing broadcast media is the lack of competition, which has bred a deep pool of distrust. With the FCC being pulled away from overregulation, we could see an explosion of conservative media.
Naturally, the left is afraid of this with every fiber of their body. They thrived because they could spread narratives in a relative vacuum. It was easy to lie when you didn't have someone equally loud shouting the truth.
But this was inevitable. At some point, the people were going to get sick of it, elect someone with the mind to unmake the authoritarianism within the government, and unleash the American people.
That day has arrived.
