‘We’re living in the world Breitbart created now’

Alexander Stille, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, traces the current bunkered state of the US media landscape back to Reagan’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. When the doctrine was introduced in 1949, there were limited broadcast licenses. Regulators, concerned with ensuring the public was exposed to a certain plurality of views, stipulated that radio and TV license-holders had to operate in the public interest. If a TV guest advocated against smoking, the channel then had to provide an opportunity for rebuttal by, for example, someone from the smoking industry. “Broadcasting tried to do as little editorializing as possible because it was complicated and messy and their licenses might be at stake if they were seen to have lurched too far in one direction,” says Stille. “That meant that broadcasting was incredibly bland and centrist.”

Cable television changed that. It created the possibility of hundreds of channels, which gave rise to the idea that a plurality of viewpoints could be presented by multiple, partisan channels. Stille says that line of thought is flawed. “People don’t consume news by watching five different channels. They have their channel that they tend to watch. So what we’ve had is that people have gotten further dug into their own news environment.”