The misinformation industry threw our election.
Believe it or not, there was time when self-described journalists wouldn’t have been allowed to just make stuff up all day long without presenting opposing viewpoints. That time was before 1987, when the federal Fairness Doctrine was eliminated.
The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enacted adopted in 1949. It required broadcasters both to present important and controversial topics, and provide time for opposing viewpoints.
But that rule went away in 1987, as part of deregulation under the Reagan administration. Conservatives thought the Fairness Doctrine impinged on free speech, and that free market competition would take care of fairness.
Peddlers of information were now free to sell fiction as fact, like counterfeiters printing their own money. And just like counterfeit money, misinformation is really cheap to produce, and has a huge market.
Emotion sells. If you’re not required to tell the truth, you can just make up addictively provocative stuff. And since you don’t need to put any time or money into actual reporting or fact-checking, it costs you next to nothing to churn it out and rack up the revenues.
And what do you know, after 1987 right wing talk became the top commercial talk radio format in the U.S. Further deregulation made the format particularly lucrative, by allowing the formation of conglomerates like Clear Channel. They could afford to pay big syndication fees to the most popular hosts, led for many years by Rush Limbaugh, who got very rich by making his listeners very angry. Not surprisingly, Rush was inspired imitators: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and many more.
V’s turn had to wait for the arrival of digital cable and satellite technologies, which brought a proliferation of channels, along with the need to fill them with content. That enabled Rupert Murdoch’s 1996 creation of Fox News, which quickly began its rise to number one among basic cable channels.
As with right wing talk radio, Fox isn’t really in the news business, but a news-like form of the entertainment business. Despite its (possibly deliberately) ironic slogan of “Fair and Balanced,” what Fox sells is sensation, with objective information playing a distinctly secondary role.
There are legitimate reporters at Fox. But the network’s cash cows are the heavily biased, highly provocative opinion shows, like Fox and Friends, Hannity, and the industry-leading O’Reilly Factor.
New technologies also enabled the right-wing web. The introduction of the graphical Mosaic browser in 1993, followed by easy site-building tools and the rise of cheap bandwidth, meant almost anyone could be a publisher. Soon enough, that came to include hot button-pushing “news” sites, from the Drudge Report, to InfoWars, to WorldNet Daily, to Breitbart, to who knows how many more.
There was money in all of it — a lot of money.
In 2016, Forbes magazine ranked Rush Limbaugh the world’s 10th highest-paid celebrity, with an estimated salary of $79 million. His net worth is variously estimated at between $350 million and $500 million.
Fox News’ 2015 revenue was projected at $2.3 billion, and the 2016 number will no doubt turn out to have been even higher, given that Fox broke ratings records on the back of the most attention-grabbing election campaign ever. Forbes estimates the net worth of Rupert Murdoch, who also owns other major media properties, at $13 billion.
In 2012, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget estimated that the Drudge Report was earning $50,000 a day, and that founder Matt Drudge must be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Blodget made this startling comparison:
In short, the Drudge Report is almost as big a digital media property as The New York Times.
That’s absolutely staggering.
Why?
Because The New York Times is produced by ~1,200 journalists. The Drudge Report is produced by one.
Blodget is exaggerating a bit here: earlier in his article he estimates the total Drudge staff at “maybe three.”