• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1354 days ago

    After Watergate Americans learned that a free press could bring down a tyrannical government. So the Right got to work destroying the free press.

    Reagan went after the Fairness Doctrine and made it easier for one company to own all the TV and radio stations in a town. The new tech helped destroy the local newspapers.

    • @asteriskeverything
      link
      English
      663 days ago

      The more I learn, the more I learn Republicans have been hurting America for decades

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        163 days ago

        Around 55 years, when the southern strategy was enacted to solidify racist support for Republicans.

        Before that the parties were more mixed and it was the confederates and robber barons doing the damage. Before that it was the slave owners. And before that it was the colonizers. Before that it was probably whichever tribe had the best growing season or pointiest flint arrowheads.

        I’m starting to second guess what the point of progress really is. Are we trying to ride humanity out until the heat death of the universe? Or just the next billion years before the sun boils our oceans away? Another 2000 years so today’s assholes can become deities? 52 more years the the US Tricentennial?

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          4
          edit-2
          3 days ago

          The lethargic, stagnant, apathetic, merciless, ignorant, xenophobic state of humanity in the sci-fi Lord of the Rings fan fiction called Warhammer 40,000 is getting increasingly more prophetic.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        33 days ago

        Try at least a century. Go listen to some of FDR’s campaign speeches, many of them are as relevant today as when they were given.

    • LustyArgonian
      link
      English
      7
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      And after the Panama Papers, they got to work with Khashoggi. After Epstein, they got to work with Twitter

      • @FreakinSteve
        link
        English
        12 days ago

        The Fairness Doctrine was not about ownership. The 1996 TCA was exactly about ownership.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        12 days ago

        1996 is 16 years after 1980, when Reagan started it.

        Blaming the Act is like saying Harry Truman won WW2 for the Americans.