family CBN

Okay, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate, basically when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves needs to serve the public interest. So what do they mean by the public interest? Yeah, right? It's like super vague, right? But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War Two, They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want us radio stations to become propaganda outlets. And so in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events and you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine.

With few exceptions, most market democracies have recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. But the public has not recovered from the shock of watching supposed experts and politicians, the people who posed as the wise pilots of our prosperity, sound and act totally clueless while the economy burned. In the past, when the elites controlled the flow of information, the financial collapse might have been portrayed as a sort of natural disaster, a tragedy we should unify around our leadership to overcome. By 2008, that was already impossible. The networked public perceived the crisis (rightly, I think) as a failure of government and of the expert elites.