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by username135 601 days ago
There was a time that all news was required to be fair and balanced. See the fairness doctrine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

1 comments

The fairness doctrine only ever applied to broadcast TV and radio. It was considered constitutional on the grounds that these were limited public resources. It never applied to newspapers, cable TV, or web sites, which were far less limited.

It was never really the reason that news broadcasts aimed for fairness. They aimed for fairness because they were journalists, and they considered it a point of pride to be accurate and informative.

The broadcast networks (including Fox affiliates) still aim for that, despite the end of the fairness doctrine. But their markets have been eaten into by cable networks, some of which were explicitly founded as propaganda machines and discovered that people preferred it as entertainment.