This first allowed for rush limbaugh (rest in piss) on radio, which led to fox news, led to Bush jr, led to Palin, led to tea party, led to citizens united, led to trump, led to Jan 6, led to project 2025, led to ufc pedophile party on the front lawn of the half demolished white house and the reflecting pool filled with brawndo.
Always Remember: you don’t hate Ronald Reagan enough
Hate perturbs the mind; poisons it. What you focus on becomes what you grow to become. That’s why I look at feet so much, so I can be the princess I always wish I was!
This is 'Murica in a nutshell though
Reagan was voted in as president because the populace is stupid, and just saw a face they recognised
The same thing happened in CALIFORNIA, many years later, when the harm that Reagan had done was well known (to the civilised world, admittedly. Muricans ignored it, despite living through it)
America will choose hate and stupidity, if the think that there’s a tiny chance that they will personally benefit as individuals
Most of them are stupid, and stupid people are afraid, and afraid people are easy to manipulate
Daily reminder that these voter counts are still the minority of the country doing things.
There are way too many stupid people, but it’s still not the majority
They’re just the ones that are controlled (the “machines” of the matrix so helplessly dependent on the system they will fight to protect it), and thus they are made to be the most vocal, and as a result, those who cannot think for themselves get sucked up to be Borg while it helps repel many who find their ways to the deeper truths of the occult, like how this is how we intentionally engineered our culture.
Apparently it is not whether they will benefit, more so that they are afraid someone else will. Our national motto is “Fuck those guys.” Deceptively simple with it’s darker meaning where those guys is not defined, only that the slightest perception of a variance in world view will put one into that category. Divided we fell.
Yeah,
For the wealthy, it’s about getting ahead
For those who want to be wealthy, but aren’t, it’s about shitting on other people
It’s a cruel society
many years earlier*
Reagan was governor of CA before he was president of the U.S. .
Press F for fuck this guy.
Both
sidespolitical partiesAlso springs to mind, Clinton’s acceleration of Nixon’s corporate media consolidation.
90% of what is shit in this country can be blamed solely on Reagan. The other 10% is lingering racism.
now that’s what i call legacy
Hey! That’s not fair
Some of it was Nixon too
Don’t forget Joseph McCarthy. Huge turning point!
I think anyone who sponsors a bill should have 12 seconds to explain why their bill benefits the PEOPLE and if they can’t in that 12 seconds they get fried/electrocuted and the bill dies just like the sponsor did. If they suggest it benefits a corporation instead of the people then they get tortured before they get fried. But they still die, and it still fails.
12 seconds
A lot of bills are very complex, often too complex to explain to any degree in 12 seconds (even the Death Note gives you 40s for a cause of death, and 6:40 for details). Maybe give them a few minutes. Otherwise, no notes.
Rush Limbaugh’s show was just starting to syndicate across the country, but radio stations who played his show, were supposed to balance it with 3 hours of alternate programming, and neither he nor the conservative radio station owners liked that. He spoke out often against the Fairness Act, and loudly called for its end. So once Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine, those stations went to work.
First they bookended Rush’s Noon-3 PM slot. I believe Hannity was before him, and Glenn Beck was before Hannity. Where I lived was a fairly neutral local talk show, followed by Laura Ingraham. Other show were gradually added until the station had 24 hours of conservative talk. There was enough demand that a second Conservative talk station came on, obviously without Trump as the tentpole, but they still survived.
Every city added Conservative talk stations, and the Conservative Propaganda Machine envisioned by Cheney and Ailes in the wake of the Watergate debacle, was underway. In the mid-90s, Ailes produced a half-hour TV version of Rush’s radio show, which was successful, although It didn’t last, because it was too much work for Rush, but it was proof of concept, and allowed Ailes to put together Fox News.
And that’s how Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Roger Ailes ushered in the Golden Age of the Conservative Propaganda Machine, following the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine.
Years of far Right wing extremist chudservative propaganda and it’s consequences are a disaster for American democracy and American society
Somebody should have taken those 4 out before their toxic bullshit was allowed to fester.
Rush Limbaugh
I danced a jig in my cubicle when he stopped sucking down oxygen. One less piece of filth taking up space. Unfortunately, he gave birth to plenty of others.
The perfect example of “I’ve never wished for a man’s death, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
Eh, who am I kidding? I wished for Limbaugh’s death for years.
Yeah, same here. You guys checked out the behind the bastards podcast episode of rush Limbaugh?
TLDR
Conservatives (Regressives) are quite literally destroying this country.
Aka chudservatives
Seems like this should be near the top of the list for Democrats to fix if they ever take power again. I mean, if they can muster the effort to make a list. Weird that they didn’t do this in 2009.
The 2009 fillibuster-proof majority was a lot shorter than people think. They needed 60 Democrats in the Senate to override fillibusters from the GOP, and Al Franken was engaged in a legal fight to take his seat in the Senate that took months.
By the Time Franken was seated, Ted Kennedy had stopped showing up and lingered for months until his death. His interim replacement wasn’t seated until right before the Christmas holidays. And then in January the Tea Party had replaced Kennedy with a Republican in a special election.
It’s a miracle they managed to rush through the ACA, but that’s also why it was a broken mess. It should have been fixed in reconciliation with a House version of the bill, but then it would have had to go back to the Senate. The House passed the exact, broken language of the Senate version so the GOP couldn’t fillibuster it.
And the GOP spent the next 7 years blocking any progress. Moscow Mitch sponsored a bill that the Dems backed, then fillibustered his own bill just to stop any progress.
Yes, thank you for reminding the class about how poorly the Democrats managed being in control and how they did not (and still do not) have a real plan with legislation ready to go. It’s always something out of their control, isn’t it?
It’s not weird at all, they’re beholden to billionaire donors, not voters.
It’s a pattern in US presidencies: Republican sets new policies, then the next Democrat quietly accepts their predecessor’s platform, even expanding on it as they see fit.
Clinton didn’t push back on the fairness doctrine or the housing finance reforms (giving us sub-prime morgages and the '08 crash) of Regan and Bush Sr.
Obama accepted the war in Afghanistan, the enhanced interrogation, and the PATRIOT act of Bush Jr.
Biden kept and expanded the tariff and trade war policy of Trump’s first term, and continued militarizing the border in an attempt to out-right the right.
Otherwise known as the ratchet effect.
I know the Fairness Doctrine was a good thing but it kind of sounds like false balance to me. Of cause it’s better to put a climate change expert next to a climate change denier instead of only listening to the latter but wouldn’t the Fairness Doctrine also make it more difficult to only interview the former? Or would that fall under News? Maybe I’m missing something here.
Thats why you require due impartiality instead of equal time.
The biggest detail I think you aren’t seeing is that the fairness doctrine made ‘Opinion Pieces’ on air much less attractive as a host, as a producer, etc. So generally they just WOULDN’T present anything that wasn’t just news unless it was a political debate and the two sided conversation would be natural.
So it was false balance but now it’s worse? Is that a way to put it?
It was a real balance that was usually more trouble than it was worth, so they just didn’t produce content that needed to be balanced. They did current events and breaking news, weather, stock markets, that sort of thing. Just facts.
Not so much of the commentary we have today. They just said what happened that day, they didn’t suggest how you should feel about it. That’s the worse part about now.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t consume too much US media but where I live, there is a lot of false balance so the fairness doctrine sounded like that. So, to come back to my example, a climate scientist would be science news, just facts.
Partly. From my understanding, a climate scientist simply reporting facts would be science news. Weighing in on what we should do in response to the facts would probably be considered a viewpoint that warrants equal time for the opposing view. But then the Fairness Doctrine predates me by a few decades, so idk.
The main reason it’s overrated is that it only applied to broadcast networks. It wouldn’t do anything to hold Fox News accountable, since Fox News is on cable.
It might have helped with the Sinclair style bullshit in local news but they’ve lost a huge amount influence to the internet anyway.
Exactly.
And who determines whether it’s “news” or not when it’s something seen as controversial? Oh, the corporations that own the channels/shows? What could go wrong?
Yeah, it would make it so you had to legally put a climate change denier on.
So you do a segment that says “here’s a scientist with noting to gain from deceiving you and, by legally required contrast, a climate change denying corporate shill whose profit motive in lying to you is jarringly obvious.”
You still have the lunatic there to rile up the audience, but you don’t ONLY have the audience riling lunatic on.
No you wouldn’t. This is a common misconception. The law allowed for the reporting of facts without having to have a wacko on there denying them. Every time a journalist mentioned gravity, they didn’t have to have someone come on and say that gravity didn’t exist. They weren’t constantly having to have people come on claiming that heliocentrism was false with every morning show.
Who determines what’s “fact”?
Because climate change is pretty indisputable, but the corporations that own the news have a vested interest in continuing to dispute it.
that’s a pretty shit argument… you could say the same about almost any law… this is why we have the legal system. who determines what’s fact? judges and juries… and you have laws in place in order to sort things out before the courts need to get involved
libel and deceptive advertising are exactly the same: who determines what is fact? courts… and people tend to do the right thing to avoid prosecution for the most part
and then you have anti-SLAPP laws to protect against frivolous lawsuits
You have far more faith in our broken-ass system than I do then.
i have very little faith in your broken system… that doesn’t change the fact that what you have now is so much worse
So you do a segment that says “here’s a scientist with noting to gain from deceiving you and, by legally required contrast, a climate change denying corporate shill whose profit motive in lying to you is jarringly obvious.”
Why would you do this when you yourself work for a massive corporation with vested interest in pretending it’s not real?
I’m skeptical about the Fairness Doctrine. Not everything has a valid “other side”.
I’m also certain that it would be used as a tool of manipulation had it continued to exist until today.
It would be quite strange. “Here is all the research that being gay is something you are born as. You can also just choose to not believe that and think they are demons.” Like how would you both sides half of the current “discourse” without just saying actual lies? There is no proof of immigration being negative but if you hate brown people that’s a negative?
It was also targetted at public broadcasters, it would not have affected Fox as a cable-only channel
and yet still better than the absolute cesspool that yall have right now… both sides is better than basically 90% propaganda because at least it shows that not everyone thinks the same
Whatever flaws the Fairness Doctrine had, it was clearly preventing what we’re experiencing now.
Bring it back.
it was clearly preventing what we’re experiencing now.
Yeah that’s not clear at all though, is it? You’re equating correlation with causation
The FCC is currently trying to apply Fairness Doctrine to late night shows in retaliation for them having James Talarico on.
I think that’s the Equal Time Rule, which is different (and more defensible imo)
Ronald Reagan Ruined Everything.
It’s really true. He was packaged and sold and is now touted as some hero.
It’s a good thing he was an actor. If he hadn’t came down with Alzheimer’s he may have gone to prison for selling drugs and missiles.
I cheered when he died.
One of my least favorite things about the culture I currently live in is that people believe, without a doubt, that there are two sides to every issue. Every news story, every decision, every fucking thing needs ”both sides” to weigh in. And the world gets dumber and less interesting and more myopic. There are hundreds and thousands of viewpoints on any given topic, but if we get a couple of the most inane then we’re totally covered and the world goes on being “fair.”
I mean I get that not kicking babies in the face might seem like a clean cut issue, but have you ever discussed it with a pro baby face kicker? Obviously there’s two sides to the story here!
They never told me that was a career option in high school.
I know some babies that need to be kicked in the face.
Like Trump?
Not only that, but it gives the other side a dangerous amount of legitimacy if we treat “both sides” as equally valid.
There are a lot of beliefs and opinions that are just bad and should only be ridiculed.
This has to be one of the most harmful lasting cultural effects of the internet… Every moron with an opinion deserves a platform now apparently.
Fuck “both sides”. The problem with US media is that it’s all for-profit corporations.
