Bum Sums: The Fairness Facade

IT’S ANOTHER WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER!

Brew that cup of coffee, crack open that window, and turn on that AC. While the planet’s temperature continues to rise for some odd reason that nobody has figured out, make sure you hydrate with water today. Those microplastics aren’t gonna drink themselves.

They say empires fall after 250 years. Well good thing today is the United States of America’s 249th Independence Day. 

While the Bum Diary continues to break big stories, show new worlds, and all that hoity-toity jazz, I still need something to write in this week’s newsletter. I feel like it is an appropriate time to dig into the past policy that explains why everyone and their mom’s politics are extremely polarized.

The policy was proof of fair media distribution being possible. Its death was proof that this country is purposefully divided for profit. It is the reason why social media is designed to keep you addicted. It is the reason Fox News exists. It definitely is the reason why Donald Trump is so easily tearing this country apart right now.

The Fatal Facade of Fairness

The year is 1949. 

You live in the United States of America. World War II ended three years ago. The U.S. economy is stronger than ever. J. Robert Oppenheimer is still attending his weekly therapy sessions. The Great Depression only ended ten years ago. Ten years before that, the Great Depression started. We’re only twenty years from our country’s worst economic rock bottom.

Twenty years move by quickly. Before we know it we’re living in the most financially stable economy ever, the one we dreamt of just two decades before. The nation’s most beneficial byproduct from the war was the rapid acceleration in technological production. The second World War introduced a lot of new toys that boosted our economy: microwaves, jet engines, post-traumatic stress disorder, radar, atomic bombs, Cheetos, duct tape, helicopters, super glue, computers, penicillin, and television channels. 

While the T.V. itself was invented by the Scottish in the late 1920s, the first ever electronic television service (channel) was used by Nazi Germany to promote propaganda and broadcast state-sponsored events in 1935. When the war ended in 1945, the production of television sets in the United States skyrocketed as troops returned home.

There were only 44,000 tv sets among the 140 million U.S. citizens in 1946. But now that the war is finally over, people need to watch something that can clear their mind without requiring too much physical stress. Over 4 million televisions exist in 9% of U.S. homes just three years later. By 1953, half of the houses in the United States have a TV set. 

The people love television, very much understandably so.

But here’s the issue: there are only three commercial broadcast channels on TV. You are always either watching NBC, ABC, or CBS. NBC is the National Broadcasting Company, CBS is the Columbia Broadcasting System, and ABC is the American Broadcasting Company. NBC and CBS have been around since the 1920s, when radio was still the mainstream form of commercial broadcast entertainment (when Radio City Music Hall was a venue for live radio shows).

So there’s only three damn channels on television. Everybody is watching it, including your good ol’ pals known as the U.S. Federal Government. But nothing on TV is good yet. There is no The Sopranos, Celebrity Wife-Swap, or Love Island. 

No Sopranos? Just move your nuclear family to New Jersey and lie to the future generations that you are 100% pure-bred Italiano. No Celebrity Wife Swap either? Sorry, that’s just an Oval office party game. No Love Island yet? Sorry, that’s a different Oval office party game.

So your government friend known as the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, just celebrated their 15th birthday. They’re the independent government agency in charge of regulating the United States’ broadcast radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable services. In 1949, they were just dealing with radio and television.

But “The Big Three” networks are kind of uptight stressed Hollywood assholes who won’t let another competitor toss their hat into the ring. But you’re the government agency representing the country that just vaporized two Japanese cities. You rep the country that helped end the war of all wars, and now, you need to make sure your country is going to stay at the top. 

You learn that the Soviets, who you spy on constantly because you don’t trust them, constantly spy on you too because they don’t trust you. Nobody trusts anybody. The U.S. government needs to regulate and control its people’s voices, before any crazy shit gets out of hand. You especially don’t want one of these three TV channels to rot the innocent baby boomer brains of 1950’s youth––that’s what all the lead paint and in their house is for. 

You’re worried NBC, CBS, and ABC are going to misuse their broadcast license abilities to influence a biased agenda on the public. Whether that agenda is with or against the government’s actions, the feds see their citizens running companies that could really shake up the rest of the country. Or at least, shake up the country’s opinion on the government’s actions.

The FCC creates the Fairness Doctrine in 1949. The text mandates broadcast networks to devote time to contrasting views on public issues. Whenever addressing controversial subjects, media outlets would legally have to amplify differing viewpoints and correct themselves on air if ever showing bias. 

Congress backs the doctrine 5 years later in 1954. 

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Our newest generation of Americans, the baby boomers born between the late 40s and early 60s, are entering the adult world for the first time. It’s the Nifty Fifties. Then the Swingin’ Sixties. Everyone is drinking strawberry vanilla milkshakes, playing hooky at drive-in movie theaters, and walking past the whites-only water fountains. A Cold War is heating up pretty quick now that we’re racing the Russians in space. 

We’re also in Vietnam, expanding our post-WW2 military empire further. 20 years go by in the blink of an eye. We might have beat the Russians in space, but the Vietnamese are still gunning us down. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t received so civilly. Worst of all, the Beatles are on the rise. For all we know, the world’s first boy band wants to dismantle all of Western Civilization. 

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Now it’s the late 60s. Generation X, which includes my parents, are starting to join the world. This new generation enters between the late 60s and early 80s. There aren’t any fun nicknames for these decades; only the boomers are allowed to have those.

 By the 1970s, the FCC claims that the fairness doctrine is the “single most important requirement of operation in the public interest”. What first existed to provide diverse opinions soon transformed into being used by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to debate political opponents. 

But then The Beatles break up. The four of them––Paul, George, [REDACTED], and Ringo––smoke jive talkin’ grass one too many times and hate each other. Let It Be’s last album cover features four boxes with each individual Beatle singing their own tune. They aren’t singing the same tune in the same box anymore. The band was done for…and so was all of Western Civilization.

Watergate also happens , so nobody trusts the U.S. president’s word and begins questioning our leaders’ motives more. The Kent State shooting massacre happened only two years before too, which was when the Ohio National Guard shot a bunch of college students legally exercising their rights of protesting the Vietnam War. 

While the Watergate scandal is blowing up, the U.S. economy is shrinking thanks to the 1973 oil crisis. The Yom Kippur War of 1973––when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur––breaks out. The U.S. supports its ally Israel. We’ve been locked in arms with them since the humble founding of the our C.I.A. in 1947 and Israel’s Mossad in 1949. The Soviet Union supports its oil-producing allies Egypt and Syria. OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, calls for an oil embargo on the United States. Long story short, gas gets expensive real fast in the U.S. Gas station tanks are empty. 

Sidebar: The 1973 oil embargo is also the reason why Japanese car manufacturers exploded in popularity in the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s. American and European vehicles were gas guzzlers in general, but Japanese cars like the Honda Civic and the Datsun 280Z were cheaper to produce, fuel efficient, and more reliable automotives. It's why the Toyota Corolla has been the highest selling car for god knows how long. 

The U.S. loses to Vietnam in 1975. The one good thing from ‘Nam was that it inspired George Lucas to base the Evil Galactic Empire off the United States (and the Nazis, but that’s a story for another time). Star Wars: A New Hope releases in movie theaters in 1977. Star Wars nerds grow by the hundreds, if not thousands. Neighbors start locking up the front porch door that they left unlocked all the time. 

These generations of U.S. Americans trust the media and news outlets off any impulse thanks to the Fairness Doctrine. They grow up in a time where the news has to make sure it is just the news, and if it is anything more than that, they’ll have to embarrassingly correct themselves live on air unless they want to get sued by some wackjob Christian Nationalist organization.

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It's now the early 1980s. Everyone is drinking New Coke, playing hooky at the local arcade, and digging for records inside the hip mall that replaced where that whites-only water fountain used to be. The Berlin Wall, Yugoslavia, and Blockbuster still exist. This new thing called the compact disc is starting to replace vinyl records. You can play video games at home now too. This new cable channel called MTV is globalizing music culture for the first time. 

TV is no longer dominated by just the big three networks; it’s now four, sort of. NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service, slept on goat). Cable TV, the hip alternative for more than just local channels, has been gaining popularity since the 1970s. It grants people access to more channels and premium program services––such as the Home Box Office channel we now know as HBO. 

Even though HBO exists now, this is still a different age of technology. There’s still the rather common fear that U.S. citizens will witness a nuclear holocaust. While U.S. college radio stations play upcoming bands like The Cure, The Smiths, and New Order in order to build an ultimate army of 1983 goths, a more evil sinister force is brewing up in Australia. 

Australia? My-favorite-surf-rock-scene Australia? Yes. That Australia. Let’s have a moment of silence for all the Aussies out there. Alright moment over.

Rupert Murdoch, the guy whose family Succession is based off of, is a multimillionaire Australian entrepreneur. He buys this failing British newspaper and saves it with autonomous production processes in the early 1970s. It’s called The Sun. In 1973, he also buys this small struggling American newspaper as a test run––The San Antonio Express News. In 1976 he starts the U.S. based Star magazine, which is one of those magazines you browse in line when you’re in line at the supermarket. He also buys the New York Post the same year. 

In 1980, the U.S. entered a recession due to a failed policy constructed around the U.S. energy crisis of the late 1970s. The energy crisis, which started during the Iranian revolution, was our byproduct from our initial interference with the 1973 oil crisis. 

Rupert Murdoch has expanded his Australian media empire News Corporation Ltd. into both the United States of America and the United Kingdom. His U.K. papers support the political actions of Margaret Thatcher (may she rest in piss) and his U.S. ones are also politically striking––but that’s really it. For now.

Ronald Reagan has been the president of the United States for one term already, from 1981 to 1985. His ‘Reaganomic’ policies sweep the nation, where he promises tax cuts and financial security to a then financially unstable nation. He’s actually just cutting non-military government spending, ignoring the AIDS crisis, enforcing strict immigration policies, and poisoning low-income American neighborhoods with crack cocaine. But the country doesn’t see or hear this. 

For example, his Immigration Reform and Control Act makes it illegal for businesses to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, but he also pardons the nearly 2.7 million current illegal immigrants to become legal citizens. Team blue and team red support Ronald Reagan, it seems like he’s fighting for every hard working American. Even his presidential campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” combats everyone’s economic distress at the time. 

Ronald Reagan wants to stay in power as the president of the United States. During his first presidency, Rupert Murdoch visits the White House in 1983. Their first meeting was arranged by Rupert Murdoch’s lawyer at the time: Roy Cohn.

Roy Cohn, the prosecutor of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trials from the 1950s (when we executed two U.S. citizens because they were supposedly Soviet spies). Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who worked with Joseph McCarthy to fear monger anti-communist propaganda throughout the 1950s. Roy Cohn, the political player that built his reputation as anti-communist and anti-gay, who claimed that homosexuals and communists infiltrated the government. Roy Cohn, the closeted homosexual that died from AIDS in 1986 after helping Reagan’s administration ignore the crisis. Roy Cohn, a character in Tony Kushner’s terrific play Angels in America. 

Roy Cohn, the personal lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump in the early 1980s. Roy Cohn, the crude lawyer played by Jeremy Strong in the 2024 Trump biopic The Apprentice. Jeremy Strong, the actor my friend Lily is obsessed with, plays the character Kendall Roy who wants to inherit his fathers’ global media entertainment company in Succession. Succession, the hit dark-comedy television show based on Rupert Murdoch’s actual children and company News Corporation Ltd., is produced by the Home Box Office company which we now call HBO.

Nine days after this photo was taken, Cohn wrote to senior White House aides stating, “I had one interest when I brought together Reagan and Murdoch…at least one of these major publishers would become and remain pro-Reagan” which sounds…legal.

Murdoch immigrates and becomes a legal U.S. citizen in 1985. He has to forfeit his Australian citizenship in 1985 due to a new regulation requiring TV station owners to be American citizens.

But even though Rupert controls U.S. papers like the San Antonio Express, New York Post, New York Magazine, and the Boston Herald through his company News Corp, there’s just one last obstacle stopping him from making all these mass media newspapers vocally pro-Reagan for the next election.

The Fairness Doctrine Act. 

For some reason that nobody could ever guess, Ronald and Nancy Reagan want to loosen the government’s economic regulations. Why would someone want the government to care less about how they make their money? I thought they rightfully worked their ass off for it, unlike every other generation? Surely, the reasons are just. Surely.

Deregulation was a big thing Reagan went for. By 1986, Reagan eliminated at least half of the federal regulations that existed in 1981. You gotta know the rules to bend the rules. 

Rupert’s News Corp buys out television stations and syndication rights (syndication is when tv programs are distributed through local stations rather than national ones) from Metromedia. The deal is complete in 1986 after Murdoch received his American citizenship. 

On October 9, 1986, Rupert Murdoch launches the Fox Broadcasting Company commonly known as Fox. Rupert wants FOX to compete with the big three networks NBC, CBS, and ABC.

The current chairman of the FCC at this time is Mark Fowler, who worked on Reagan’s presidential campaign in both 1976 and 1980. He writes a report that the Fairness Doctrine hurts the public interest and violates free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. 

Journalists find out, because, well, they’re journalists. They worry the Fairness Doctrine is the only law still allowing their voices to criticize Reagan’s policies on TV and the radio. It is. 

The FCC vote to get rid of the act with a 4-0 vote. They claim because of the many diverse media voices in the marketplace, the doctrine was unconstitutional. They claim the Fairness act restricts journalistic freedom and prevents controversial issues of public importance from being shared, when it really exists to solely protect those rights. 

Congress members claim the decision is wrongheaded, misguided, and illogical. Congress tries to codify the Fairness Doctrine into law to prevent this all from happening. They propose a bill: The Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987 S. 742.

The bill passes. The legislation is then vetoed by President Ronald Reagan. Congress is unable to get enough votes again that’ll overturn his veto.

1987. The Fairness Doctrine fails to be reinstated. It’s dead in the water.

Conservative talk radios described as unfiltered, divisive, and vicious are growing in popularity now in 1987. A year later an ABC Radio executive signs Rush Limbaugh––that Rush Limbaugh––to a nationwide syndication contract. They offer Limbaugh air-time to stations fully for free. From the beginning of his air-time, Limbaugh viciously ranted about conspiracy theories and divisive topics. He coined the term ‘feminazis’, something he would have immediately been taken off the air of for saying only a year before.

The late 80s blur into the early 90s. People have personal phones and computers now. Fox is growing stronger and stronger as a global media corporation. It buys half of 20th Century Fox’s content. It buys out two separate book publishers to form HarperCollins. It runs Sky News in the U.K. And it’s still run by its parent holding company News Corp out in Australia. 

Sidebar: Fox Entertainment is the reason why The Simpsons and The X-Files not only exist, but are incredible television shows that ran for a hot minute. They’re some of my favorite tv shows ever. These shows were huge back then too, meaning their popularity was even bigger for Fox who was relatively new to the game at the time. But to Rupert, it was just one step in his massive jump for television domination. 

On October 7, 1996, the Fox Entertainment Group launches the Fox News Channel. It’s a 24-hour cable news channel that is built to compete against CNN. 

Today, Fox News is a massive conservative news channel. You knew that. It has been the most watched cable news channel in the U.S. for the past 23 years. You might not have known that. Fox News continued to grow in popularity throughout the 1990s. But the 1990s is now dealing with a whole different storm of media distribution at the same time: the internet entering the global public.

It’s the 2000s now. The internet is growing in popularity real fast. 9/11 just happened, and everyone has fingers to point at who is to blame. U.S. citizens get scared real quick. Nationalism is back, baby. We call french fries “freedom fries” to reclaim our statehood.

The first wave of social media arrives. Instant messenger services like AOL and Microsoft Online Messenger are the talk of the digital town. Blogging begins to boom in popularity, where sites such as myspace.com, twitter.com, facebook.com are beloved by the millennials entering adulthood for the first time. 

The second wave of social media started with the iPhone in 2007, in my opinion, where third-party apps became available to download on Apple’s app store. Apps like Instagram and Snapchat surge in popularity with the globalization of smartphones, utilizing key features that rely on taking photos and sharing them with the world. 

I think we’re at the end of the second wave of social media. I haven’t even brought up TikTok yet, which pretty much cracked the puzzle to keeping people on their phones through constant videos. Anyways, all the main social media platforms––Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter––rely on coded algorithms to dictate what content you see first. Whether you want to accept they use your data or not, these algorithms are built to do two things: keep you scrolling while exposing advertisements. 

These are companies employed by people, not machines. People make money, spend money, and lose money. Especially the companies that have access to all your personal data. They provide advertisers with a direct audience to market their products. But social media is scientifically, technically, bad for people. The rapid rise in teen suicide rates alone directly correlate with the rise in social media usage. In the grander scheme of things, I simply don’t think us humans have evolved to comprehend the constant storm of random strangers’ opinions 24/7. 

So you, the developer, gotta trick users to stay online as long as possible, to get as much of their time as possible, to get as much money from the advertisements for your pockets as possible. You got bills to pay and people to please afterall. But people go on apps in their free time to see stuff they like, not the stuff that they don’t like. They can turn their phone off and walk away at any second. There’s a million better things to do in the world than go on your phone. So you gamify the system. 

Users can like or dislike content. Users can keep score streaks if they send photos to each other daily, but will lose them if they don’t. Users can pay for verified accounts to bolster their ego and brand loyalty. Users can see if their video is #1 trending in the world. Users can see how many other users saw their post. Users can sponsor their content onto other users. 

If you ask any young person’s opinion on the current state of Instagram, you’ll most likely hear some equivalent to, “it fucking sucks now.” Whether that is because the young person is afraid of change, the young person is nostalgic for a period that no longer exists, or because Instagram does fucking suck now, that young person is right. All it does now is suck the life out of you.

These algorithms are designed to promote controversial content to its users. Sure this could just be how they test their marketing demographics, but it goes deeper than that. If you’re scrolling through Instagram Reels and get a video with polar opposite politics than your own, that’s not just coincidence. 

They know if you see controversial, taboo, sensitive, or topical subjects, you are more likely to look at the comment sections and reply. When you make a comment, the algorithm boosts the post for it to gain more traction. It sees comments as wanting to contribute to the conversation. When more people are making comments back at you, there’s a good chance that video is about to gain a lot more attention. 

So…whether you’re a MAGA Lovin’ Trump supporter or the budding apprentice of Luigi Mangione, these companies that preach about their business being the place for the free news of the internet––where all the hip cool kids and popular friends hang out at––don’t care about you at all. They care about how many times you watch videos about seed oils or the Mangione family tree, so they can jab your face with the other end of the stick. 

Suddenly you’re a lot more enraged about transgender people or tech billionaires or school shootings or genocide. It doesn’t matter what pisses you off, what matters is that you’re pissed off. And you’ll stay pissed while using the app designed to keep you scrolling.

I don’t like to use hypotheticals. But if the Fairness Doctrine was still intact, I bet you that social media companies would not lazily operate the way they currently do. 

So why does this matter?

The Baby Boomer and Gen X generations of U.S. Americans trust the media and news outlets off any impulse thanks to the Fairness Doctrine. They grew up in a time where the news had to make sure it was just the news, and if it was anything more than that, they’d have to embarrassingly correct themselves live on air unless they want to get sued by some wackjob Christian Nationalist organization. So they’ll fall much easier for politically striking material and misinformation. They’ll fall for AI generated videos on Facebook.

Then there’s the other side of the same coin. The younger generations, Millennials and Gen Z, grew up in times of disruption so they do not trust jack shit. Exposure to the internet at too early of an age might desensitize you, but it’ll also teach you early on how to navigate the web. But at the same time, we’re on social media all the time. It has its moments, sure, but man it just sucks right now. It feels surreal using an app you know that is using you.

So because of the Fairness Doctrine’s death, news companies and media outlets no longer have to carry the responsibility of accurately reporting news and information with credible sources. This is now the norm for the “media narrative”. Now all the news channels hate each other and are competing for views. Then the internet kicks down the door and disrupts the printed newspaper industry. Now the newspapers are online, fighting with social media apps trying to get your attention, so they all spew bullshit that has no business consequences. But digital articles have less of a guaranteed sale unlike physical print products, so all the newspapers put up pay walls in order for you to pay to access their content. That’s when you stop visiting the online newspapers all together.

So then Trump enters in a disrupted media field he has years of experience in. He knows when and how to lie to the people that want to hear it. His mentor was Roy Cohn, afterall. He’ll be hypocritical to his own claims just so he can come out on top. If the Fairness Doctrine existed today, he wouldn’t get away with all of the misinformation he spreads during election debates.

This was a grim piece. I hope you all learned something. If you enjoyed reading and think a friend would too, forward them this email. That’s all for this week on Bum Sums. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more stories.

Written by Max Van Hosen.

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