Liberating Conservative Voices

Daniel Henninger on the rise of conservative media in the US in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the “Fairness Doctrine” in media.

Ronald Reagan tore down this wall in 1987 (maybe as spring training for Berlin) and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.
It wasn’t obvious that conservatives soon would dominate talk radio. Radio programming has always been a soulless decision based on ratings. If programmers thought they could win the drive-time slots with Don Imus reading “Das Kapital,” that would be on the air and advertisers would support it. But it’s not.
What worked after speech became free in the spectrum ozone was hyper-articulate conservative hosts opening their microphones to millions of hyper-angry conservative voters–not least in such liberal bastions as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America and the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952–the years in which the Fairness Doctrine largely kept politics off the air. This didn’t happen because the Gingrich candidates were getting their message out in the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe.