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Some would date the revolution in American media to June 1, 1980, when, at 6:00 PM Eastern Time, CNN began broadcasting around-the-clock news. But, while CNN was 24/7/365, it differed only in the volume of televised news it carried, not different from the quality or the lean of legacy network news. Indeed, CNN quickly became a part of legacy news. That is what it is aspired to. That is what it became.
Others would point to August 4, 1987, as the beginning of the revolution, the date the Federal Communications Commission repealed the “Fairness Doctrine” by a vote of 4-0 under FCC Chairman Dennis R. Patrick’s leadership.
Still others would point to August 1, 1988, when Rush Limbaugh launched his program on ABC Radio Networks and began broadcasting over his then 50 affiliates. “Rush built the mall,” I tell most audiences interested in the birth of conservative talk radio. “Mike Gallagher, Larry Elder, Mark Levin…we just have stores inside that mall.”
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Rush provided “proof of concept” to AM station owners and a demand signal to all of media that half of America was not just under-served but actually unwelcomed. The market responded. Brian Kilmeade, Guy Benson and many others on the Fox Radio Network are part of the ever-expanding news universe on the center-right.
“The good bulk of the press in this country was monolithic — liberal to varying degrees,” Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch commented on the tenth anniversary of the launch of Fox News in 2006. This was an echo from what he had said at the actual launch ten years ago: “Frankly, all the others look alike. We will be an alternative.”
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Of course, the success of the network and the brand has been phenomenal. What Rush Limbaugh did for radio, Rupert Murdoch did for cable news: Prove the concept that there was an enormous, unmet demand in consumers of news in America for center, center-right and conservative news. As with Limbaugh, so with Murdoch: Great success followed by others entering the lists with the same basic model.
Even a cursory glance at cable news ratings screams out that Murdoch was right and perhaps right far beyond what anyone suspected. Fox News doesn’t merely dominate the ratings, it crushes them. Through three decades of rising to and remaining on top, the formula has been the same: Put professionals on the air who reflect what patriotic and America-loving portions of the news-consuming public believe and ask them to present the news in a fair, measured way through the start of prime time.
Always be reasonable. Always be open to other views. Use light humor and sly derision by all means, but even the “opinion hosts” work to “stay within the 20s” even as daytime stays firmly “within the 40s.”
Counter-factuals are never very productive, so spare yourself the time you would waste imagining a world in which Fox News had not been launched and thrived. It would be — even its worst critics should admit this — so much less interesting, so much more grey than had legacy news been left to its own devices, pumping out the same-old same-old over the past 30 years.
Having carved out for itself a formidable Gibraltar of a fortress for its brand, it is unlikely that Fox News will be displaced from the top of cable news specifically, and indeed increasingly “the news” generally for years to come.
What we see now are the first, tentative steps of legacy media to consciously try and shrug off the reputation for bias it built for itself since the Vietnam War turned legacy media into a vast swamp of advocacy journalism.
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That’s a huge mountain to climb, especially as so many previous attempts have failed. Like universities that hire a visiting professor with glowing credentials on the right for a year or two of appointment as a “Visiting Scholar,” the underlying institution is looking for camouflage not a genuine commitment to the ideas it has long locked out of its halls.
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30 years down the road, the country will again check in and see that “journalism” remains a craft, not a profession, and the best craftsmen are fully aware of the world around them, not blinkered to half or more of the news horizon.