WI: Fairness Doctrine kept in place

JoeMulk

Banned
If the Fairness Doctrine had never been revoked in the 80s how different would the face of media have been?
 
In radio, it would have a pretty big effect in terms of preventing the rise of partisan political talk radio. In television, though, it'd be rendered largely obsolete by the adoption of cable, since the Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast channels on the "public airwaves".

I wouldn't be surprised to see the niche of talk radio being filled by cable channels, with earlier and wider creation of cable news/commentary networks with highly partisan (or highly ideological) editorial leanings.
 
Probably at first. After a while, though, one major network would eventually gain a monopoly on right-wing cable news due to consolidation, better funding or just inferior competition among the crazy right.

If you get rid of talk radio, there's plenty of room for multiple channels to carve out their own sustainable niches. There's at least as much ideological diversity on the right wing as there is on the left, and there's also room for channels to specialize based on format (for example, a news-heavy format, a talk/interview-heavy format, a documentary-heavy format, etc). There's only one Fox News now because they're competing with talk radio and with blogs and other online news/commentary sources, but ITTL, there's no talk radio, and there's a significant time gap between the rise of cable and the advent of blogging as a major news source.
 
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