How to Unf*ck America Part 3:

By Rob C.

TL;DR: Once upon a time, news was boring — and that was a good thing. But then Ronald Reagan deregulated honesty, Bill Clinton deregulated everything else, and Rupert Murdoch turned rage into ratings. Now America lives in 300 million alternate realities, all brought to you by six corporations and a few billionaires. Welcome to Part 3 of How to Unf*ck America:- Unf*ck the Media.

There was a time when the news wasn’t supposed to make you feel anything. Not rage, not joy, not the dopamine hit of “owning” your ideological enemies. The news was supposed to inform you — remember that word? — so you could make decisions as a citizen in a democracy.

This quaint little idea was backed up by something called the Fairness Doctrine, introduced in 1949. It said that if you wanted to use the public airwaves — and yes, those airwaves belong to us — you had to serve the public interest. You had to provide factual, balanced coverage. You had to separate your entertainment from your news. In short, you had to respect the truth.

It wasn’t perfect. Cronkite was human, Huntley and Brinkley had their biases. But America shared a common reality. We argued about what to do with the facts — not whether the facts existed.

Then came Ronald Reagan, corporate America’s favorite movie cowboy and the CNP’s poster child, who saw the Fairness Doctrine as a terrible obstacle to profit and propaganda. In 1987, his FCC decided fairness was “unnecessary.” (You can almost hear the corporate boardrooms pop champagne that night.)

Suddenly, Rush Limbaugh and his talk-radio clones could spew venom without balance. Rage became a product. Outrage became a business model.

By the time Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the last thread of public-interest regulation was gone. The Act promised “competition and innovation.” What it delivered was monopoly and manipulation. A handful of media conglomerates swallowed up thousands of local stations. NBC merged with Comcast. Disney devoured ABC. Viacom, CBS, News Corp — all merging, mutating, multiplying.

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Six corporations came to control roughly 90% of everything Americans watch, read, or hear. Six! That’s not a free press — that’s a board meeting with better lighting.

And in the middle of it all, Fox News perfected the dark art of infotainment. What if you made people furious all the time — and then monetized that fury? What if “both sides” became code for “one side lies and the other has charts”?

Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcasting bought up hundreds of local stations across the country, forcing anchors to read corporate-scripted “commentary” disguised as local news. It worked — because people trust their local newscasters. And Salem Broadcasting, the megaphone of Christian nationalism, turned AM radio into a pulpit of fear, purity, and profit.

By the 2000s, the right had created an information empire that looked grassroots but was anything but. Coordinated. Funded. Relentless. From think tanks to podcasts to pulpits, the message was the same: Government bad. Billionaires good. Liberals evil. Jesus loves tax cuts.

Then came the social media apocalypse. Facebook, Twitter (now X, the letter of fascism), YouTube, TikTok — all competing for one thing: your attention. And the best way to keep it? Outrage. Division. Fear. Algorithms learned to feed you exactly what confirmed your worldview and inflamed your emotions. The result? A nation that can’t even agree on what day it is, let alone who’s destroying it.

And the cherry on this poisoned sundae? The same billionaires who own our politicians own our media platforms. They monetize our attention, weaponize our ignorance, and sell the data to whoever pays the most — from ad agencies to authoritarian regimes.

So, how do we unf*ck the media?

Start by remembering: the airwaves are ours. The internet was built with our tax dollars. Regulation isn’t censorship — it’s accountability.

We need to:

• Reinstate public-interest requirements for broadcasters.

• Break up media monopolies and tech giants.

• Require transparency in algorithms and political advertising.

• Fund independent, nonprofit journalism.

And maybe, just maybe, stop rewarding people who lie to us for a living.

Because if we can’t agree on reality, we won’t be a democracy one for long.

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🗳️ Written by Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale and the ongoing series “How to Unf*ck America.”