Charles W. Chook Bryant

It was definitely a flawed policy.

I think everyone agrees that it wasn't perfect.

But the legacy is really complex.

You know, getting rid of it basically opened the door for what we have today, which is a degraded new standard, minority viewpoints that aren't necessarily covered, and how polarized we are because, you know, people dug in and they said, all right, I'm going to start my super conservative radio stations.

And then people said, I'm going to start my super conservative liberal website and radio shows.

Right.

Liberals are going to listen to theirs and conservatives are going to listen to theirs and never the tween shall meet.

Yeah, I mean, one thing we can say is without the Fairness Doctrine, we may not have gotten any of these minority viewpoints in the 1940s and 50s and 60s.

People might not have been as well-informed except maybe via newspaper about the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Rights Movement.

how bad smoking is, about nuclear power plants.

Like all of these things that were sort of in the shadows now had a guaranteed platform.

But like we mentioned earlier, because they didn't really, they had to give these opposing viewpoints, he also could have possibly borne the anti-vax movement and the climate denial movement and stuff like that.

So it was flawed, to be sure.

Yeah, but I mean that was a purge.

That was just like there's a bunch of rotten food in the fridge and why has no one thrown it out yet?

Yeah.

Here's where we are today, though.

There was a poll, a Gallup poll, just last year in 2018 that found Americans don't trust the news.

They guessed, let me see, 62% of what they hear is biased, 44% is inaccurate, and 39% is misinformation.

Yeah.