Charles W. Chook Bryant

And that really sort of laid the groundwork in a big, big way for the Fairness Doctrine, even though the Fairness Doctrine sort of undid that.

It did.

And said, well, you know, you can editorialize, but you just have to do it on both sides.

Yeah, and the broadcasters did not like it for sure because, again, they were still sort of confused about what does public importance mean.

We're not even sure.

You know, everything's decided and applied on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, in other words, if somebody just files a complaint, basically, they will take up that complaint and hear that complaint.

But it wasn't some, like, big sweeping thing.

Yeah, so what happened in a lot of cases was some radio stations were like, you know what, I'm not even going to go there, and I'm going to avoid controversy altogether.

Because I don't think we pointed out it wasn't just about politics.

It was basically covered controversial issues in general.

And this will play a big part, like everything from climate denial to the anti-vax movement in the 1980s.

Like they all had to have equal time under the fairness doctrine.

And a lot of people point to the fairness doctrine as like how these movements got jumpstarted to begin with because they didn't put those opinions in context.

They were just like, you know, they didn't say this is very scientifically valid.

And now here's the opposing viewpoint, which has no science to back it up.

Or fined.

Yeah, and it also, you know, that kind of thing, if advertising counts, that opens the doors, and it did for, you know, like, and we'll get to this more specifically later, but like if a power company wanted to do an ad about their great new nuclear power plant that they were going to build, like a liberal group can come forward and say, no, no, no, like that's not an ad.

I know they're paying for airspace, but that means we need to talk about the ills of nuclear power.

That's right.