Truth- The Lasting Casualty of Our Self-Inflicted Wounds: Reaching Back Into the History of the…
By: David Labella
Tags: Journalism, Supreme Court, Public Policy, Media Criticism, Ideology

Truth- The Lasting Casualty of Our Self-Inflicted Wounds:

Reaching Back Into the History of the Ideological Divide

“I am sure the mass of Citizens in the United States mean well; and I firmly believe they will always act well whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters; but in some parts of the Union, where the sentiments of their delegates and leaders are adverse to the government, and great pains are taken to inculcate a belief that their rights are assailed, and their liberties endangered, it is not easy to accomplish this; especially (as is the case invariably) when the Inventors, and abetters of pernicious measures, use infinitely more industry in disseminating the poison, than the well disposed part of the Community do to furnish the antidote. To this source all our discontents may be traced, and from it our embarrassments proceed. Hence, serious misfortunes, originating in misrepresentation, frequently flow, and spread, before they can be dissipated by truth.”

- George Washington, letter to John Jay, May 8, 1796

The schisms and differences Washington referred to were, in the last years of the eighteenth century and immediately after, largely regional and economic, as the contrasting interests of Northern mercantilism and Southern agribusiness created constituencies that aligned with the generally Federalist inclinations of the former and the republican mind-set of the latter; they were, however, no less political and ideological. Talk of Southern secession was already in the air by the 1790s, when the ink on the fledgling Constitution had only lately dried. Despite The seeds for the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833- the prelude to the Civil War- were sowed in local resistance to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798- and to the concomitant growth of Federalist power at the time- and given voice in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of that and the following year, when the otherwise patriotic Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively, committed their passionate objections to Hamiltonian Federalism to print. It was clear, by the late 1790s, that the United States was, more than it would ever be a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, more than it would ever be a haven for tolerance, well on the way to being- then as now- a landscape not so much of peoples, but of contrasting, even mutually hostile, ideas. And, then as now, so it would be as well for truth, which had, and has, its own conditional, subjective topography.

“I am biased in favor of God, the Republican Party, and free enterprise. Time will not allow the stuffed dummy of impartiality to stand in the way of telling the truth as it sees it.”

— Henry R. Luce

If there ever was a golden age of American media reportage, it may have occurred during the period of time spanning the 1930s and the mid-1970s. The news that was presented to the nation was spare and restrained in its portrayal of events and personalities, despite charges to the contrary; and, more importantly, the media gave its readers and viewers a basic framework of verifiable information, and then trusted them to decide according to their own sensibilities where the truth lay. Yet beginning in the mid-1960s the truth had become more difficult to discern; by the mid-1970s we were no longer quite so willing to accept the premise that there was only one truth. Something had to give. And, besides, there was money to be made in shaping opinion.

Beginning with their reaction against unfavorable coverage of the Reagan administration, conservatives- through what had become a symbiosis of columnists, ideologically-oriented foundations, conservative candidates during primaries and elections, and the access already afforded them on televised news magazine programming, brought the populist appeal of their repetitive accusations against the liberal media to the forefront of the nation’s political dialogue. Their message was remarkably consistent, yet it would never have gained the traction it did without the banal yet persistent appeal of Reagan’s mystique and deft use of his colloquial rhetoric. Grafting Reagan’s popularity onto the more far-right agenda of the social and religious conservatives was soon more than liberalism, already at a political disadvantage in the Congress and in the eyes of a majority of the public, could bear up against. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, liberal ideals had represented the political currency of the nation. By the early 1980s, conservatives had been able to reverse the polarity of the national conversation in such a way that their message- simplistic and intellectually impoverished though it often was- appealed across class and economic distinctions in much the same way as Reagan’s coalition of voters had encompassed conservatives and moderates alike. Before Reagan’s second campaign was underway in 1984, conservatism was able to present itself as a unified front that contrasted sharply with the confusion and factionalism that characterized liberalism by that time. At the same time, media outlets that had been considered moderately liberal or even politically unaligned were driven to adopt a compensatory tack to the left. Yet one change led to another, and the first and most lasting casualty of the shift toward partisan news reportage would be the truth- always vulnerable in American public discourse: the truth became a condition of professional opinion, not professional skepticism. Information became suspect, a plaything in the hands of the ideologues. So, too, for public policy.

Emboldened by the mandate that Reagan’s consecutive victories gave them, conservatives immediately recognized the power of the broad appeal of their characterization of leftist ideals as corrosive to morality and their assertion that the mainstays of the news media were biased and beholden of liberal interests. They knew as well that they did not, and likely would not any time soon, command a majority of American opinion, but they also understood that, politically, it did not matter- their task was to convince and motivate enough voters in key districts and states so that they could build reliable new constituencies outside of their strongholds in the South and West, while translating as much as they could of their social and spiritual ideals into policy and governance. To do so required that they identify and command the attention and loyalties of niche groups and splinters of conservative-leaning constituencies that had been overlooked in their calculations of electoral potentialities. Conventional grass-roots outreach could only go so far- it was clear that the media would become the new platform for political advocacy.

In the interest of achieving their goals, they began to brand any news story, documentary, article, or commentary that contradicted their choice of causes as liberal, socialist, and unfairly biased. They also directed their criticism at organizations and news outlets that they considered institutionally aligned with liberalism: the New York Times, the three major television news outlets, and, to an increasing degree, public broadcasting and its marquee news documentary, Frontline, which debuted in 1983 as a production of WGBH-TV in Boston. Similar in its presentation to other news magazines produced by the major television networks, Frontline offered detailed depictions of individual issues, typically instances of corporate malfeasance, fraud, governmental inefficiency or wrongdoing, or the appearance of willful violations of laws or regulations designed to protect consumers. As part of a larger pattern of consistently rejecting claims raised against larger businesses or entire industries, regardless of the depth and demonstrable verity of the charges raised against them, conservatives began to espouse a near-automatic support of businesses and conservative-leaning individuals of power and influence whenever they were challenged by investigative journalism, and concentrated the full weight of their critical rhetoric on any news organization that attempted to report on instances of collusion, negligence and criminal behavior, violations of ethics codes or safety regulations or of workers’ rights, price fixing, and any other cases of unfair business activities by loudly portraying them as liberal and biased, and as incapable of objective analysis by their association with organizations or a leadership that displayed a predilection for liberal politics or ideals. Documentaries and stories that depicted leading industries in the energy and mining sectors, in finance and investment, in defense contracting- all of which were considered crucial to national security, drew intense condemnations from the right; similarly, investigations into the activities of the military, the CIA, into claims of waste and redundancy in weapons systems, into untoward practices in intelligence gathering- again, all contained under the general category of national security- invited immediate and persistent criticism from the conservatives. Despite the application of a dispassionate, apolitical methodology, whereby the documentation of the evidence cited on behalf of the case being presented by the news programs and journalists was revealed as incontrovertibly true, whether in Congressional hearings or as a result of rulings in court cases, the right continued to claim that evidence was fabricated, that witnesses were biased and politically motivated and that their accounts were unreliable; that juries or judges were swayed by the control exerted over the release of information and the reporting of liberal news organizations. Their relentless efforts paid dividends in two ways- it hardened the attitudes of people who had already convinced themselves that the news media were biased against conservatives, and it created a ready-made audience for conservative causes which, until that point, had in fact suffered from a lack of news coverage that was sympathetic with their viewpoints. Counting on the short attention span of most American news consumers, the right understood that, even when nearly all of the claims against industries and interests they favored were validated, the impact of their anti-liberal messaging was all that remained stuck in the minds of their constituents. Matters of fact and truth were largely forgotten, or drowned out by the incessant drumbeat of conservative invective.

By the early 1980s, AM radio was dying in America. Popular music had been the staple of the format for decades, but the higher fidelity of the FM bands had managed to attract every style and programming format away from AM, leaving the medium to host local and generic news broadcasting that had changed little from its inception. There was ample bandwidth for the taking. Paul Harvey Aurandt, who would become famously known as Paul Harvey, began working for his local radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1933. After a brief service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Harvey moved to Chicago and began broadcasting for the ABC affiliate WENR, acting as the host for a program dedicated to directing ex-service personnel to employment; within two years he had his own news commentary show, “The Rest of the Story,” in which he perfected the style and choice of content that would be the template for a remarkable broadcasting career that lasted until 2008- topic-oriented commentary in which he offered brief sketches of what he presented as parables of contemporary life that illustrated his personal convictions- governmental incompetence, Washington D.C. overreach and superfluity, the plight of honest, hard-working people faced with a faceless, soulless federal entity that only served its own interests. At the time, conservative radio commentary was a minor niche, as was liberal commentary- throughout its history, broadcast journalism and commentary had, until recently, and despite persistent claims to the contrary, remained remarkably balanced in its portrayal of events and public policy. In its early years, conservative radio was principally represented by Fulton Lewis, Jr., whose career predated that of Harvey and overlapped it until 1966. Between them, Lewis and Harvey were able to attract loyal followings not only for their conservative views but also for their iconoclasm and idiosyncratic styles, and the stylistic template they had perfected cleared the way for the rise of conservative talk radio programming in the 1980s.

In 1984 an intermittently employed radio on-air personality from Missouri replaced the abrasive and controversial talk host, Morton Downey, Jr, at KFBK-AM in Sacramento, California. During the 1970s, having presented standard AM radio fare in central California for several years- news, information, sports, and information for agribusiness- options for programming were limited, and KFBK turned to a news-related format that included vocal commentary and call-in access for residents within their broadcast range, which took in much of California’s agricultural heartland- the Central Valley. Downey had ably used controversial statements and an aggressive style to raise the profile of the station; his replacement, Rush Limbaugh, immediately understood the reach of the powerful signal strength of the station and the impact of Downey’s style, and emulated it in his broadcasts, which featured news commentary and topical content related to local and national political issues. At that time, topical broadcasting content was governed by the Fairness Doctrine- imposed by an act of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1949, which required that programming devote time to the airing of issues related to the public interest- a broad, somewhat ill-defined terminology that was understood to include political campaign appearances, issue-driven debates, and national and local dialogue concerning matters of public interest. Under the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasting licensing was contingent on any station’s compliance with strictures designed to compel them to guarantee that equal time would be given to the airing of competing or opposing viewpoints- essentially forcing broadcasters to schedule an equal share of time to both sides of an issue impacting the public interest. Difficult to enforce and often cumbersome to implement, let alone comply with, the Fairness Doctrine nonetheless attempted to assure that a multiplicity of viewpoints would be available to the public, yet non-broadcast journalism and news- newspapers, magazines, and other printed periodicals- were not required to honor similar guidelines, marking the Fairness Doctrine as an easy target for challenges questioning its constitutionality under the First Amendment. With no authority for ensuring compliance, the FCC relied on case-specific examinations of broadcast content; finally, in 1967, in Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, the first significant legal challenge to the Fairness Doctrine reached the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld a prior judgment of the Court of Appeals affirming the right of the FCC to mandate equal access and equal opportunity to present dissenting viewpoints in matters of public concern:

“The broadcasters challenge the fairness doctrine and its specific manifestations in the personal attack and political editorial rules on conventional First Amendment grounds, alleging that the rules abridge their freedom of speech and press. Their contention is that the First Amendment protects their desire to use their allotted frequencies continuously to broadcast whatever they choose, and to exclude whomever they choose from ever using that frequency. No man may be prevented from saying or publishing what he thinks, or from refusing in his speech or other utterances to give equal weight to the views of his opponents. This right, they say, applies equally to broadcasters.

— Associate Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, June 9, 1969

Still, part of the Court’s decision indicated that the primary rights under protection of the law were those of the listeners, not of the licensees, the broadcasters, and warned that if it could be determined that the Fairness Doctrine was limiting free speech, its constitutionality could be called into question; yet the Court made no mention of similar situations involving the print media, the difference being that they did not operate under licenses granted by the government. Only five years later, in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority opinion, in which the Court reversed the finding of the Florida Supreme Court, which had ruled against a Circuit Court decision involving legal access to print media, reiterated that position. Under a state statute, petitioners had the right to demand equal space for rebuttals against editorials or articles they deemed inaccurate or unfair; the Circuit Court had sought to overturn the law on the grounds that it violated the free speech rights of the newspaper; the Florida Supreme Court ruled in turn to support the appellee, ruling in favor of his intention to sue the newspaper for damages. The Supreme Court ruling reversed that of the Florida High Court, protecting the right of the media outlet to exercise control over their content:

“The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials- whether fair or unfair- constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be exercised consistent with First Amendment guarantees of a free press as they have evolved to this time.”

— Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the majority, Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo

The distinction drawn between print media and electronic media rested on the fact that there was a finite number of licensed wavelengths issuing news and public content, whereas there were no physical limitations on the number of print venues that could be run as private businesses. The electronic media operated at the sufferance of the availability of bandwidth access and the willingness of the FCC to issue licenses. Another decade would pass before the matter would come before the Supreme Court again; their finding in FCC v. League of Women Voters of California indicated that the Court’s consensus had begun to shift. The narrowly-decided ruling (5–4) characterized the issue as a challenge to the federal prohibition against allowing the nonprofit CPB to publish editorial content. In the majority opinion written by Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the case was outlined in these terms:

“The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (Act) established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit corporation, to disburse federal funds to noncommercial television and radio stations in support of station operations and educational programming. Section 399 of the Act forbids any noncommercial educational station that receives a grant from the CPB to ‘engage in editorializing.’ Appellees (Pacifica Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that owns and operates several noncommercial educational broadcasting stations that receive grants from the CPB, the League of Women Voters of California, and an individual listener and viewer of public broadcasting) brought an action in Federal District Court challenging the constitutionality of 399. The District Court granted summary judgment in appellees’ favor, holding that 399 violates the First Amendment.

The restriction imposed by 399 is specifically directed at a form of speech — the expression of editorial opinions — that lies at the heart of First Amendment protection, and is defined solely on the basis of the content of the suppressed speech. Section 399 singles out noncommercial broadcasters and denies them the right to address their chosen audience on matters of public importance.

Section 399’s broad ban on all editorializing by every station that receives CPB funds far exceeds what is necessary to protect against the risk of governmental interference or to prevent the public from assuming that editorials by public broadcasting stations represent the official view of government. The ban impermissibly sweeps within it a wide range of speech by wholly private stations on topics that do not take a directly partisan stand or that have nothing whatever to do with federal, state, or local government.”

The Court’s overturning of Section 399 drew the ire of conservative members of the Court, who decried the assumption that an inviolate standard of fairness existed that did not, in some way, reflect or serve the interests of the benefactor of noncommercial media- in this case the federal government- solely on the basis of some guarantee of impartiality under the fairness doctrine:

“The ‘fairness doctrine’ is no answer to the concern that Government-funded organs of mass communication will, overall, take a pro-Government slant in editorializing and thereby create a distortion in the marketplace of ideas. First, the ‘fairness doctrine’ is itself enforced by the Government. Second, that doctrine does not guarantee other speakers access to the microphone if they disagree with editorial opinion expressed by the station on public policy issues. No other voice need be heard if the Government determines that the station’s editorial ‘fairly’ presented the substance of the opposing view. Moreover, as appellees argue, editorials from an institution which the public may hold in high regard may carry added weight in the marketplace of ideas. That fact, however, magnifies the evil sought to be avoided, for the danger is that pro-Government views that are not actually shared by that institution will be parroted to curry favor with its benefactor.”

— Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, FCC v. League of Women Voters of California

It was clear that, by the time of the Court’s decision in FCC v. League, decided on July 2, 1984, momentum was gathering behind the growing disenchantment of many media outlets with the Fairness Doctrine. They would not have long to wait to see their wishes realized; in 1985, serving FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler, a communications attorney with a long history of service to President Reagan’s national campaigns, submitted a report detailing the injurious nature of the Fairness Doctrine, which moved the Congress to direct the FCC to investigate alternatives to it; by August 1987, FCC commissioners- all appointees of the Reagan and Nixon administrations, ruled 4–0 that restrictions against content in the electronic media were unconstitutional under the First Amendment and that the distinctions applied under the Fairness Doctrine were arbitrary and limiting of free speech. The Congress attempted to rewrite the Doctrine as law, yet Reagan vetoed the bill, and the restrictions against editorial content and the strictures that demanded equal time for opposing viewpoints were removed. The electronic media could, finally, air the content it wished, that its advertisers and underwriters preferred, and that their particular audiences sought out. With the removal of the last barrier to partisan news coverage and content, the talk radio medium was free to be used as an outlet for one-sided political and topical discourse. Rush Limbaugh, poised in Sacramento for just such an opportunity, recognized the latent power that could now be unleashed.

It did not matter if they imagined it or not, nor was it the intention of the conservatives to engage in legal or constitutional hair-splitting- access meant power, power meant funding, funding meant more access in more markets. In August of 1988, Limbaugh moved his program to the ABC Radio affiliate in New York; two years later he commanded a larger audience than anyone else working in his format. He subsequently relocated to West Palm Beach, Florida, where he remains to this day. In the immediate aftermath of the discontinuation of the Fairness Doctrine, objective questioning of conservative characterizations of the treatment their views had received by the larger media outlets and media orthodoxy in general could be answered easily enough- liberal academia had inveighed against the right wing of the Republican Party for many years, and the leading news outlets, if not openly biased against certain views, were at least reticent in their treatment of them. Still, there was more than one single brand of conservatism. If it was true that the standard-fare broadcast media had outlets had limited the ability of conservative voices to air their views, their reporting of the right generally employed verifiable sources and reflected real events based on information that could be corroborated by documentation. Many conservative commentators operated in the same fashion, as they had always had done. Understanding, though, that market share- and advertising revenues- defines influence, and that influence validates content, opportunistic right-wing talk radio and television hosts employed other tactics that gave them the instant gratification that only falsehoods offer. Limbaugh’s style and choice of content- and that of Paul Harvey as well- centered around a mixture of valid, if highly selective, news reportage and fabricated claims leveled against liberal politicians and commentators, Democratic officials and politicians, socially progressive policies, and moderates and centrist Republicans who would not abandon the political center for the outer reaches of their party’s emerging extremist ideology. Combining anecdotal evidence, innuendo, statements taken out of context, and outright lies resonated with listeners who were predisposed to accept the premise that the government actively colluded in league with shadowy liberal interests arrayed against them; that the power held by liberalism represented a threat to their version of a proper American society on a par with or even greater than that of global Marxism (which was, by then, all but irrelevant); that the notion that only their views were valid and worthy of discussion and belief was self-evident and inviolate; that ill-defined global forces were arrayed against them, bent on taking their earnings in taxes and redistributing them to the entitlement class; that the control over their lives that they believed they were deserving of was being turned over to outside agents that would impose a world government on them, violating their legal rights in the process and enslaving them in a socialist state.

With pre-existing guidelines on access removed, with the wide editorial latitude enjoyed by predecessors such as Father Charles Coughlin serving as an encouragement, with what was rightly described as a voiceless, invisible audience- comprised mainly of working-class white Americans disillusioned with decades of socially liberal government; eager for a share of the spotlight that had served liberal causes so well in the 1960s and 1970s, and with the same conservative groups waiting for a validation of their ideals from someone who could, through words alone, give them a sense of empowerment that, in modern times, only Nixon and Reagan had, Limbaugh, left for several years without a competitor in his market segment, rapidly rose to a position of fame and social and political relevance without precedent in the country’s history. Even more remarkably, conservative intellectuals, neo-conservatives, serious social and religious conservatives- some of whom Limbaugh regularly criticized for not being true to their ideological brand and for being of insufficient allegiance to conservative core principles, sought his support and benediction, altering the landscape of conservative politics at a time when conservatism was facing an uncertain future after the departure of Reagan and the multi-faceted disappointments engendered by the moderate and internationalist G. H. W. Bush. Willing to compromise civility and their traditional moderation and collegial decorum for Limbaugh’s irresponsible exaggerations and falsehoods, many conservatives made a conscious choice to reap what benefits they could from Limbaugh’s visibility and appeal in the name of achieving repeated electoral victories over liberalism. Liberals, with their traditional media outlets still mainly sympathetic to their views, retained their means of access to the political dialogue yet they could not compete with Limbaugh’s ability to take the simple, repetitive messages of modern conservatism and turn them into weapons-grade invective that could expose weaknesses in the liberal brand- both real and imagined. Checkmated in what had become a high-stakes challenge for the ear of the political center, liberals were, as they had been in the early 1980s, hopelessly outmatched. People who had never counted themselves as conservatives listened to right-wing talk radio out of curiosity, more so than out of any affinity they might have felt for pronouncements of the nation’s imminent demise, weakness overseas, and moral decay at home, and so they were transformed. Yet as a whole the political temper of the majority of Americans remained essentially unchanged- moderate and liberal social ideas continued to work their way into the fabric of society- quite often, very nearly in an imperceptible fashion, unaccompanied by legislation or sweeping political agendas designed to move the process forward quickly, as had been the case with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Realizing that there was more profit- and more political traction- in peddling ideas and stories fabricated around a wish-list of half-truths and bald-faced lies, the conservative right settled on a prescription for success that reached its culminating moment in 2016, when the truth was banished forever from the public discourse that attended the wholesale victory of Republican politics; whether the truth will return to trouble the airwaves and pages of the media and the halls of power is an open question. Basking in its newfound power, the new conservative media sought to compound its attacks on the left with similar efforts raised against moderate Republicans, cannibalizing them through partnering with Newt Gingrich’s model of moving the party progressively to the right by exposing and supporting far-right candidates in local and national elections. Yet there was far more to be done, and much more within their reach.

“Whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with enormous weight upon the mind of each individual; it surrounds, directs, and oppresses him; and this arises from the very constitution of society much more than from its political laws. As men grow more alike, each man feels himself weaker in regard to all the rest; as he discerns nothing by which he is considerably raised above them or distinguished from them, he mistrusts himself as soon as they assail him. Not only does he mistrust his strength, but he even doubts of his right, and he is very near acknowledging that he is in the wrong, when the great number of his countrymen assert that he is so. The majority do not need to force him; they convince him. In whatever way the powers of a democratic community may be organized and balanced, then, it will always be extremely difficult to believe what the bulk of the people reject or to profess what they condemn.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

We were never so equal with one another than we were in the 1990s, and rarely as uncomfortable with ourselves. With little to push against us than each other, we found the ’90s, despite their peace and prosperity, quite unsettling.

While Robert Bork and the conservatives inveighed against the moral decay of multiculturalism and the excessive self-indulgence of the left, the left countered by pointing to Bill Clinton’s popularity as evidence of their own under-reported strength among the silenced moderates and independents. Both were neither completely right nor wrong; Tocqueville’s paradigm was, effectively, turned on its head in the mid-1990s: American society- the social conditions under which we lived within the scope of our interests and awareness- was elusive beyond those boundaries, and, therefore, made each of us believe that ours was the right and only way for others, making us ever more entrenched in our beliefs and ideals. What we did not realize then, and do not realize still, was the degree to which our ideas were being shaped by the news media, which occupied a space and was of a configuration that was unrecognizable from that of only twenty or even ten years before. It would become clear in time that, despite the common notion that Americans paid little or no attention to news, quite the opposite was true- news was everywhere and everything, and that meant that politics were as well. Yet it was not that we were more interested in current affairs than previous generations- indeed, in terms of our comprehension of real events we were less so- it was that the nature of news presentation had undergone revolutionary changes that had a great deal of impact on the way Americans were informed, and why. Some of these changes were to be witnessed in the print media, as the country’s political polarization was reflected in a widening of a similar ideological divide in the press. To a far greater degree, these changes transformed the electronic media.

Limbaugh was to have the airwaves largely to himself for the balance of the 1990s. While he was able to convert many Americans to his view of society- or, perhaps more accurately, define and identify conservative niche groups and speak to their concerns, his primary impact was to change the nature of political discourse itself- lowering standards of journalistic integrity by indulging in the dissemination of unsubstantiated innuendo and conspiracy theories, openly appealing to racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and misogynist emotions and instincts that were still widespread throughout the country, primarily in white, working-class males. As a rule, he invited no one to contradict or question his statements, and his live call-in format insured that only supportive elements of the public were granted a full hearing; dissent was typically shouted down or screened out before airing. It was his adoption of this unilateral, one-sided approach that will eventually constitute his lasting bequeathal to the American political climate. It was not as though he had invented it- both political ideologies had been equally unwilling to allow dissent or rebuttal. Yet the vituperative, vindictive tone of his accusations, the blatant falsehoods he promulgated, the unwillingness to allow examination or citation of his supposed sources, the with-me-or-against-me ethic of his dialogue, his exchange of the truth for audience share- all called to memory the worst abuses of Joseph McCarthy and every iteration of intolerance, bigotry, and self-indulgent egoism one could call to mind. From the McCormick family-run Chicago Tribune of the first half of the twentieth century to Notre Dame Law School dean Clarence Manion to William Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader to “Fox & Friends” to Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones, right-wing media programming has enjoyed unprecedented success, flourishing after the removal of the fetters placed on it by the Fairness Doctrine, unburdened by any sense of responsibility for integrity in reporting, taking millions of Americans along with in them in the slipstream of their retreat from the truth.

On balance, though, it did not matter. The power of politics, by the 1990s, lay with ideological extremism on both sides. Debate and compromise were viewed as weaknesses, evidence of moral and intellectual dissembling or contamination. By 1996, the vanguard of cable news reporting, CNN, had been joined by Fox News and MSNBC- the former a conservative-run venue that first promoted Republican interests and, in later, years, added the far right; the latter a liberal nameplate that more closely resembled mainstream legacy network programming than, as conservatives charged, an exclusively liberal agenda. Competition for the news audience, however, sharpened the differences between these new network programs, and the guests and anchors they featured reflected both the nation’s deepening ideological divide and the political ambitions of many of their guests, who were often more interested in self-promotion than in rational dialogue and informing the public. Careers in politics and commentary were, and are, launched, made, and destroyed on cable news programs, as are court proceedings and criminal allegations. The often-cited truisms that art echoed reality or that form followed from function applied in the high-stakes game of news programming. Given, for the first time since the advent of television news, a wide array of choices in their access to news, Americans cleaved to the idiom of their preconceived notions. People listened to differing views less often, and their disagreements gained a personalized vindictiveness that mirrored that of the Congress, which had allowed itself to become a theater for rigid ideologues and one-dimensional thinking. The vocabulary of discourse ran to the lowest common denominator, the notion of a truly national unity suffered wounds from which it may never recover, and every discussion or issue became an anvil upon which the dissociation of one ideology from the other was hammered into a purer form to the extent that issues themselves no longer mattered, while the whole country watched, alternately fascinated and repelled, yet accepting of it. The American penchant for winning at any cost had finally found a compelling sense of social and political validation; accordingly, the country’s sense of identity split into two. Victims and victors, it seemed, were everywhere. On the one hand, the net effect of the rising popularity of conservative talk radio in the 1990s was that it was able to quickly minimize opposing viewpoints while retaining the stridency of its appeal to people who perceived themselves as victims of an intentional program of left-wing elitist politics by continuing to rail against the liberal domination of the media. On the other hand, the quality and utility of American political discourse was continuously degraded, and journalism gained- deservedly so- a suspect characterization that it has been unable to free itself from. But, then, it never had a particularly clean reputation. Biased reporting was as old as the republic itself, and has never left us, instead cyclically rising and falling in its ability to affect public debate. The same can be said of our sense of decency, and judgement, and of our capacity for discerning truth.

Where, then, does our responsibility lie? Is there even one? If there is not, then we must all admit that we have repudiated the premise upon which this nation was founded. We are told, and we ourselves repeat, when the mood takes us, that there is a cost to pay for freedom. Yet those costs are paid in more than risk of lives and force of arms, for the majority of us are not employed in the physical defense of our sovereignty. Our freedom demands of all of us to be of sound judgement, to apply skepticism objectively and allegiance prudently, to realize that there is a reciprocal covenant that binds us to our neighbors and nation and they to us, that tests of our character and morality are as incessant as they are rejuvenating and necessary. Our republic has never been a finished product, nor was it meant to be. We as voters bear the power, the right, and the responsibility for its maintenance and its validity, and for its renewal.

What would George Washington say? Might it be that our silence in the face of injustice and intellectual tribalism has eroded our willingness to commit ourselves to something greater than we- the well-being of others and of the nation itself? Our rising intolerance is the product of our unwillingness to resist being categorized as ideological caricatures that will always vote one way or another. The true indicator of intelligence is unpredictability. When will we- will we ever- be unpredictable again?

Copyright (©) 2020 by David J. LaBella. All Rights Reserved