Source: Common Dreams
by Thom Hartmann
“After Ronald Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule, Republican money men got the memo. Whichever party controlled the most states would have a big edge in both the Senate (and thus control of the Supreme Court nominations) and the Electoral College, and most of the low- and medium-population states had relatively inexpensive media markets. You could buy or lease radio stations for less than a party might spend over a four-year electoral cycle on advertising, so why not simply acquire a few hundred stations across a dozen or more states and program them with rightwing talk radio 24/7? This became particularly easy after Bill Clinton signed the neoliberal Telecommunications Act of 1996 that ended limits on how many radio or TV stations a single corporation or billionaire could own.” [editor’s note: Given how monolithically socialist the rest of legacy media has become, what did he expect? – SAT] (09/28/24)