Explained: Our News Media is So F*cked Up
From the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine to the rise of outrage media, America’s information war was designed—and now it’s devouring democracy.
We Don’t Share News Anymore—We Share Beliefs
At this point, watching Americans try to “debate” politics is like watching people argue about what color the sky is. Except everyone’s wearing different algorithmically curated VR goggles, and half of them are sponsored by a podcast called “Joe Patriot’s Truth Bombs.” No one’s seeing the same reality, because, in a very real sense, no one has to.
You don’t need to be a media theorist to understand that we’re not just simply polarized. We’re living in entirely different information universes.
Turn on Fox News and you’ll hear that Donald Trump is a messiah being crucified by “the deep state.” Flip to MSNBC, and he’s a wannabe dictator with the temperament of a sentient tantrum (hard agree I must say). Scroll Facebook or Twitter and it’s conspiracy-core meets depression-core meets a guy named Chad trying to explain geopolitics in 30 seconds while holding a vape.
And in this blizzard of hot takes and hashtags, one question keeps getting louder: How the hell did it get this bad?
The answer, as with so many American disasters, starts with Ronald Reagan.
How Reagan Broke the Media on Purpose
Once upon a time the news had actual rules.
At the heart of it was the Fairness Doctrine:
A policy implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1949 that said broadcasters had a legal responsibility to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance.
The goal was civic literacy, a shared reality, and a democratic exchange of ideas. You know, actual journalism.
But to conservatives, it was an ideological chokehold. In their view, the doctrine was a tool of liberal elitism, forcing them to legitimize “the other side,” which, in the conservative fever dream, meant communists, hippies, feminists, civil rights leaders, and anyone who wasn’t in favor of trickle-down economics and Cold War paranoia. In other words, anyone who believed America might benefit from empathy, nuance, or social spending.
By the 1980s, the political climate was primed for demolition. Enter Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of deregulation, whose signature move was to take functioning systems and gut them in the name of “freedom.” Freedom, in this case, meaning freedom for corporations to do whatever the hell they wanted.
In 1987, despite years of precedent and a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the doctrine’s constitutionality, Reagan’s FCC unilaterally repealed the Fairness Doctrine.
Reagan’s justification claimed that the Fairness Doctrine violated the First Amendment. Which sounds noble until you realize what that really meant: broadcasters should have the freedom to be as biased, misleading, and inflammatory as they damn well please. No balance required or accountability expected. Just unfiltered ideological programming and the ability to profit off it.
And here’s the kicker: this was a carefully orchestrated power shift. Conservatives weren’t being silenced under the doctrine by any means. They just couldn’t dominate the narrative without having to share the mic. And they hated that. So Reagan gave them the monopoly they craved.
Almost overnight, the floodgates opened and out came the rage.
Talk radio morphed from quirky car-ride chatter into a full-blown rage-fueled political weapon.
Right-wing hosts no longer had to worry about presenting “both sides.”
Now they could devote every minute of airtime to reinforcing fear, resentment, and grievance. The public airwaves, once treated as a democratic commons, became ideological battlegrounds. And the loudest, angriest voices started to win.
What Reagan did wasn’t just policy change. It was narrative warfare. And the casualties were truth, trust, and the possibility of a shared American story.
The Age of Rage: Limbaugh, Hate Radio, and the Birth of Echo Chambers
By the early 1990s, talk radio had become more than just background noise for commuters. It was a full-blown cultural movement. A new kind of religion. And Rush Limbaugh was its angry, bloated messiah.
Limbaugh didn’t just push the envelope. He shredded it, set it on fire, and used it to light a cigar while gleefully insulting feminists, mocking AIDS victims, and calling Black people "savages." His brand was shock and awe, and his shtick was venomously effective. He didn’t inform his audience. He radicalized them.
And it worked.
His show drew tens of millions. Copycats popped up like mushrooms in a cow pasture—Bob Grant, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck. The formula was simple:
Step 1: Weaponize grievance, simplify the world into Good Guys (white, Christian, conservative) and Bad Guys (everyone else)
Step 2: Say the most inflammatory thing possible to keep people listening through the commercial break
This wasn’t journalism. It was infotainment and political bloodsport. And it was the prototype of Fox News.
And the left never scaled it. Liberals experimented with Air America, NPR, even Jon Stewart, but no one matched the industrial firehose of rage and discipline the right had mastered. While left-leaning media often criticized its own (sometimes to a fault), conservative media built a fortress—a monolith of message loyalty, ready to echo whatever talking point the GOP needed to amplify.
Fox News: Becoming the GOP’s PR Department
When Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, he wasn’t just making a cable channel. He was manufacturing reality. A tightly controlled, hyper-partisan, emotionally engineered version of reality that blurred the line between journalism and political theater.
And he knew it. So did Bill O’Reilly, one of the network’s early stars, who famously said:
“I’m not sure where the business is going, but my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and man, I’m gonna be there.”
He understood exactly what was coming. Fox News took the raw, unfiltered rage of conservative talk radio and dressed it up for prime time. Imagine everything that made AM radio successful: grievance, racism, fear-mongering, misogyny. But now with higher production value, American flag backdrops, ambient lighting, and a rotating cast of blonde anchors delivering rage like it was the weather report. Fox elevated Limbaugh into an institution, slapping graphics on his rhetoric and turning partisan propaganda into a polished nightly ritual.
Fox mastered the art of manufacturing moral panic and pumping it into living rooms every night at 8 p.m. And it worked. Not just emotionally, but financially. Because it was profitable as hell.
Over time, the feedback loop tightened. Fox told its audience what to believe. Politicians responded to what the Fox audience wanted. Fox amplified the politicians who echoed their rhetoric. And around and around it went.
By the time Trump descended that gilded escalator in 2015 and declared that Mexicans were rapists, Fox had spent two decades laying the psychological groundwork for his rise. He wasn’t an anomaly. He was the inevitable result of the reality they’d been constructing all along.
Fox News didn’t just change the media. It rewired American conservatism. And it did so with a smile, a chyron, and an ad break brought to you by MyPillow.
Algorithms, Outrage, and the Digital Media Doom Spiral
Then came the internet. And with it, the final boss of media distortion: social media algorithms. A Frankenstein’s monster stitched together by Silicon Valley engineers and fed with our every click, like, and emotional impulse.
At first, social media sold itself as a digital utopia.
Facebook wanted to connect the world
Twitter was going to democratize information
YouTube would empower creators to speak truth to power
So they coded their platforms to reward what Limbaugh and Fox had pioneered: emotional manipulation.
Want to spread nuanced political analysis? Good luck. Want to post a meme blaming immigrants for everything from inflation to sunburn? You’ll go viral in minutes.
And because most of these platforms are designed for engagement, not accuracy, misinformation isn’t just common—it’s incentivized.
And suddenly, outlets that once occupied the ideological fringe—Newsmax, OANN, The Daily Wire—were being treated as legitimate alternatives to legacy news. What used to be “fringe” wasn’t fringe anymore—it was “alternative media.” And in the new digital ecosystem, being alternative wasn’t a red flag. It was a marketing angle.
The internet promised to bring us together. Instead, it handed us each a megaphone, pointed us at each other, and monetized the explosion.
When Everyone Has Their Own Facts, Democracy Dies
It’s not just about media bias anymore. That ship sailed somewhere around the time we let news anchors become celebrities and Twitter trolls become pundits. This is about media fracturing—a collapse of shared information so total, it’s like America is speaking in dialects of delusion, each one algorithmically reinforced and mutually unintelligible.
Once upon a time Americans could at least agree on what the problem was. We could argue over how to fix the economy, how to handle foreign policy, how to reform healthcare. There was disagreement, yes, but it was tethered to a common set of facts, or at the very least, a shared understanding of reality.
Now we don’t even live on the same planet, let alone in the same political conversation.
One side thinks climate change is a liberal hoax invented by China while the other side is watching wildfires torch Canada, flash floods drown New York City subways, and heat domes cook entire regions in temperatures that feel like a microwave malfunction.
One side believes the 2020 election was a Deep State coup orchestrated by voting machine software and a cabal of satanic pedophiles while the other side watched over 60 court cases, multiple audits, and Republican-led recounts confirm that, actually, Joe Biden just won.
One side thinks Donald Trump is a victim—a martyr, even—who’s being persecuted for “telling it like it is,” while the other sees a twice-impeached autocrat-wannabe with the ego of a failed casino owner and the morals of a used car commercial.
The fragmentation of facts creates permission structures for extremism. It’s how we end up with Proud Boys in the streets, anti-vaxxers disrupting school board meetings, and politicians openly fantasizing about civil war while still collecting paychecks from the government they claim to loathe.
Because once objective truth becomes optional, power fills the vacuum. And that power doesn’t serve democracy. It serves those who can shout the loudest, lie the fastest, and sell the most merch.
This isn’t just about “disagreement.” It’s about informational sabotage. It's about a country where some people are playing chess, others are flipping the board, and too many are live-streaming the whole mess for clicks.
And if we don't fix our relationship to truth—real, complicated, sometimes uncomfortable truth—we're not just losing debates. We're losing democracy.
The Collapse of Local Journalism: The Final Nail in the Coffin
If all of this wasn’t apocalyptic enough, let’s talk about what’s quietly dying behind the curtain: local news.
It hasn’t made as many headlines as the flashy media meltdowns, but the decline of local journalism is one of the most foundational threats to American democracy. Since 2005, more than 2,500 newspapers have vanished across the U.S.
And the gap has been filled by nationalized narratives, unmoderated Facebook groups, Nextdoor conspiracy rants, and AI-generated clickbait farms that produce news-shaped content with all the nutritional value of a microwaved Pop-Tart.
When local news dies we lose a shared sense of reality. We lose the infrastructure that tells people what’s happening in their own backyards. And in its place, we get politicized narratives piped in from cable news and social media, pushing talking points that often have nothing to do with the daily lives of the people consuming them.
You can see it everywhere:
Voters in rural Wisconsin who know more about Hunter Biden’s laptop than their own mayor’s agenda.
Residents of small-town Arizona raging about the border crisis while having never met an undocumented immigrant.
Entire communities where the only news source is Facebook—a platform designed not to inform, but to enrage and monetize.
This is how misinformation metastasizes: not because people are stupid, but because the local institutions that used to offer grounded, verifiable reporting have been gutted by media consolidation, hedge fund buyouts, and vanishing ad revenue.
And you know who benefits when no one’s watching? The powerful:
Developers who rezone protected land behind closed doors
Police departments that operate without oversight
School boards that pass discriminatory policies with no coverage
State legislators who slip corporate-friendly bills through the cracks while everyone’s distracted by the latest national scandal
And you know who loses? All of us. When there’s no one left to ask the hard questions at the town hall meeting, no one left to file that public records request, no one left to explain how the new zoning law will raise your rent or shut down your neighborhood clinic—we all lose.
Because democracy doesn’t just die in darkness. Sometimes it dies in silence. And right now, in too many parts of this country, the newsroom lights are off—and no one is left to turn them back on.
What Reagan Took From Us
So where does this all lead?
To a world where media is tribal, truth is optional, and outrage is monetized. A world where entire generations are being raised inside algorithmically curated echo chambers, where political identity is forged not through civic engagement but through YouTube rabbit holes, and where the loudest voices aren’t the smartest—they’re just the most enraged.
And it all started when Ronald Reagan decided that “fairness” was the enemy of freedom. Reagan framed it as liberty. What he actually did was defund civic intelligence and auction off the public square to corporate media conglomerates who realized that anger sells better than accuracy. And now we live in a country where:
Journalists are called the enemy of the people
Entire swaths of the population think the truth is a left-wing conspiracy
Those same people believe that “news” means watching a talking head scream about woke college kids for 45 minutes while advertisers sell you gold bars and testosterone supplements during commercial breaks
We live in the ruins of that decision. In a house built on polarized narratives, crumbling under the weight of manufactured fear, moral panic, and strategic disinformation. A house where millions would rather believe a Facebook meme than a Pulitzer-winning investigation. Because one makes them feel vindicated, and the other makes them question themselves.
What Reagan took from us wasn’t just a policy. He took our ability to agree on reality itself. And in its place, he left behind a media machine that profits off confusion, corrodes empathy, and destabilizes democracy—one “fair and balanced” lie at a time.
What Comes Next: Can the Narrative Be Reclaimed?
Let’s be brutally honest: we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The media landscape we’ve inherited is broken by design. And the people profiting off the chaos have no incentive to fix it.
But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. We may not be able to undo what Reagan and his ideological descendants set into motion, but we can start building something better—smaller, more ethical, and rooted in actual truth.
We can support independent, nonprofit, and local journalism—outlets that still believe the job of a reporter is to hold power accountable, not to chase trending hashtags or play cable news cosplay.
We can demand media literacy in our schools, because “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” isn’t enough anymore.
We need to teach young people how to spot misinformation, how algorithms shape perception, and how to tell the difference between a Pulitzer-winning investigation and a rage-bait TikTok stitched together by a guy who thinks the moon landing was faked by gay Marxists.
We can invest in public media. We can pressure lawmakers to fund it, protect it, and insulate it from the same market forces that have hollowed out the rest of the media ecosystem.
We can hold tech platforms accountable. That means regulation—not just for content moderation, but for algorithmic transparency. The digital town square should not be governed by invisible math that decides what you see based on how angry it might make you.
We can’t fix American democracy unless we fix our relationship to truth. That starts with admitting that there is such a thing as truth. And that the media system we deserve—the one that strengthens democracy instead of setting it on fire—won’t be handed to us by the same corporations that broke it. We have to build it. Fund it. Defend it.
Because a free press isn’t just a democratic ideal—it’s a survival mechanism in a country where the line between fact and fiction has been profitably erased. The truth matters. The narrative matters. And it’s not too late to take it back.
We Don’t Need More Outrage. We Need More Reality
The media isn’t broken because people suddenly stopped caring about the truth. It’s broken because the system stopped rewarding it. Because telling the truth doesn’t get clicks like a manufactured scandal, nuance doesn’t trend, and critical thinking doesn’t sell ad space.
And until we fix that—until we rebuild an ecosystem where truth isn’t just spoken but sustained, supported, and systemically incentivized—we’ll stay locked in this doom loop.
Doomscrolling through headlines engineered to inflame
Watching news segments that feel more like wrestling promos than journalism
Drowning in a digital sea of spin, propaganda, and performance art masquerading as civic discourse
We’ll keep mistaking volume for validity, rewarding the loudest grifters, and wondering why everything feels like it’s on fire while media executives rake in profits from the sparks.
Now it’s on us to disrupt the design. To stop feeding the outrage machine and start investing in truth-telling again. To push for a media model that values integrity over virality. To build—and protect—a civic infrastructure that isn’t driven by algorithms, but by the public good.
Because if we don’t take back the narrative, the algorithm will finish the job Reagan started. And this time, democracy won’t survive the broadcast. Not because people are evil. But because people will believe what they’re fed—and right now, they’re being fed fear, division, and digital Kool-Aid in infinite scroll.
We don’t need more outrage. We need more reality. And we need to fight for it like democracy depends on it. Because it does.
As always, outstanding work. I am so grateful for you and authors like you. Your insights and knowledge give us the truths you write about. You’re the truth-serving outlet you write about. Thanks for speaking truth in a tornado of deceit.
Great Research! "When the Clock Broke" by John Gantz is a great read too; focuses entirely on the late 1980s and early 1990s news environment and polarization.