Two Old Rulings Built Today’s Media Machine

SITUATION:

American media today runs through fewer hands than at almost any point in the last half century. A handful of families and investment groups now own the local TV stations, radio networks, and cable channels that reach the vast majority of the country every day.

That consolidation did not happen by accident, and it did not happen only because of business deals between media companies. Two decisions made decades apart, one by federal regulators in 1987 and one by the Supreme Court in 2010, removed guardrails that used to limit how media outlets could operate and how much money could flow into political messaging.

Understanding those two decisions helps explain how American media became something closer to a profit-driven political operation than a collection of independent local newsrooms.

THE TRUTH:

The first turning point was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Adopted by the FCC in 1949, the doctrine required broadcasters holding a public license to cover controversial issues of public importance and to include contrasting viewpoints when they did. It regulated balance on the airwaves, not accuracy in reporting.

In 1987, the FCC repealed the doctrine outright, arguing it violated the First Amendment and had discouraged coverage of controversial topics rather than encouraged it. Congress tried to write the doctrine into federal law that same year. President Reagan vetoed the bill, and a second congressional attempt later died as well.

The effects showed up quickly. Nationally syndicated talk radio, no longer required to balance one host’s opinion with an opposing view, expanded fast. Rush Limbaugh’s national syndication began in 1988, a year after repeal, and is widely credited as the first major show to build an audience on the model the repeal made possible.

The second turning point came twenty-three years later. In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the First Amendment bars the government from restricting independent political spending by corporations and unions. A related appeals court ruling that same year, Speechnow.org v. FEC, created the legal basis for what are now called super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited money as long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate.

The financial effects were immediate and large. Outside political spending totaled $574 million in the 2008 election cycle, the last one before the ruling. That figure rose to $1.3 billion by 2012, $3.3 billion by 2020, and $4.5 billion by 2024, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of that spending lands as advertising on local television and radio, the same stations now concentrated under a small number of owners. Political advertising made up roughly 1 percent of total broadcast ad revenue in the mid-1990s. By the 2010s it had grown into a double-digit share of station revenue in many markets, and for some stations in competitive states it now exceeds 20 percent during election years.

Put the two rulings together and a pattern emerges. Fewer companies own the stations. Those same companies now depend more heavily on political advertising to hit their revenue targets, a category of income that barely existed before Citizens United opened the door to unlimited outside spending. The financial incentive to keep that spending flowing, and to keep the audience engaged with politically charged programming, sits on top of an ownership structure already concentrated in a handful of families and investment groups.

WHY IT MATTERS:

None of this requires assuming bad intentions on the part of any single owner, host, or company. It only requires recognizing an incentive structure. When a station’s profitability depends increasingly on political advertising dollars, and a small number of owners control most of the stations receiving that money, the business case for turning news into a continuous political event grows stronger every election cycle.

This is not a story about one party benefiting more than the other.

Conservative and liberal outside groups alike have poured money into this system since 2010, and stations of every political lean have collected the revenue. The structural problem is concentration itself, not which side currently profits more from it.

For a conservative reader, the throughline is a familiar one: concentrated power, whether it sits in Washington or in a boardroom, deserves scrutiny regardless of who holds it. A media landscape shaped this heavily by two decades-old rulings, now reinforced by the ownership consolidation happening across TV, radio, and streaming, is worth understanding on its own terms before deciding what any single outlet’s coverage really means.

SOURCES:

• “Citizens United, Explained,” Brennan Center for Justice
• “10 years after landmark Citizens United Supreme Court decision, record cash flooding US elections,” ABC News, January 2020
• “More money, less transparency: A decade under Citizens United,” OpenSecrets
• “Local TV stations stand to profit from boom in super-PAC spending,” The Hill
• “After ‘Citizens United’: The Attack of the Super PACs,” The Nation
• “Buying spree brings more local TV stations to fewer big companies,” Pew Research Center, May 2017