America is the land of the free and this generally encourages everyone to think this gives them license to act freely, of their own volition. And when the population of the USA was less than half of what it is today in 1950, the year I was born, the possibilities of expansion and open decision-making was infectious to the population back then, especially after the end of the Second World War. And back then, the notion we needed to have guardrails around what was said or done was amply catered for by the police and people of authority in government and the military.
I want to give the youngest of readers a clear picture of what the ‘50s were like. You had to call the operator and book a long-distance call. New York to LA would cause a delay of up to 5 hours… Calling Europe? Try a day or more. A telegram would arrive within the same day, often quicker. There was no telex, no fax, no Internet. The US mail was fast, 1st class mail NY to LA in two or three days. Within the same city? By next morning. Radio and TV were broadcast on Federal, licensed (and federally owned), radio frequencies… what you said over the public airwaves was controlled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Fairness Doctrine. Coming off of WWII, the news reporting was made to be clinical, accurate, and without opinion. When Walter Cronkite cried on live TV when President Kennedy was assassinated it was the most opinionated newscast of the time. No one had ever done that before.
All that oversight, all that gatekeeping on truth and facts without opinion went out the window in an engineered coup organized by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney who broke the Fairness Doctrine citing the advent of cable broadcasting (that is, not public radio waves controlled by the FCC) that made such control unworkable. No, it was workable… 95% of all TV was still received by public airwaves… but they saw a way to break the FCC’s control and allow new broadcasters to color, spin, and frankly lie their way to financial success for all TV and radio pretending that the 5% of cable receivers outweighed the needs for control for the remaining 95%. Radio was not, at the time, a cable broadcaster, but Rove and Cheney made sure that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Conservative talk radio could be unleashed. What Rove and Cheney had not accounted for were Twitter, Facebook, now Meta and other Internet purveyors of content who are unlicensed, unguarded, and unfettered. The “new media” of the Internet can spout any nonsense they want to. The FCC has no effective control whatsoever.
Want to know how to build a bomb? Want to know how to kill children in a school? Want to know how to poison someone? Want to listen to a KKK grand duke or someone spout racial hatred? Want to teach “alternative facts” to a public brought up with newscasters like Cronkite and Murrow? There is now nothing to stop these people.
And in case you think I am advocating for nationalization of the news and killing free speech, I am not. In the same way that it is irresponsible and unlawful to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded room where there is no fire, so should we have gatekeepers of truth and honesty on public platforms, whether they be commercial or not.
Currently, the only safeguard we have are like the warnings on cigarette packets telling you that if you smoke, you will get cancer and die. If it were not for lawsuits against pharma companies, do you really think it is the FCC making them tell you that you could get, “…headache, nausea, vomiting, death, dizziness, and even death.” These are not FCC mandated warnings; these are from lawyers and the FDA covering their rears.
I don’t want the FDA or lawyers to control what is fair and honest on TV or the Internet. I want our government to set and apply standards of decency and honesty. I want a gatekeeper back. That’s the real value of America: truth and honesty.
