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Patmos Rhodes

Breaking News (Part 1): Oh, So That’s Why News Channels Don’t Have To Be Fair And Balanced

  • William Romanowski
  • May 15
  • 6 min read
What we are experiencing is a phenomenon known as cultural lag, when rapid technological advances outpace social and cultural norms and values.

DATE 2025

(6-minute read)

Keywords: Jeff Bezos, news and information, media deregulation, Fairness Doctrine, cultural lag


In my previous blog post I looked at how the explosion of communication technologies, entertainment sources, and changes in viewing habits increasingly fragmented viewership. I also touched on some of the benefits and drawbacks to corporate consolidation. A similar pattern is trending, having a profound impact on the way we get news and information.


Here are some statistics from the Pew Research Center (PRC).

 

  • A large majority of U.S. adults (86%) say they at least sometimes get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet, including 57% who say they do so often.

  • Digital devices are by far the most common way Americans get news, although a majority (63%) get news from television at least sometimes. The portion of Americans who often get news from TV has stayed fairly steady over the last few years, now standing at 33%.

  • Americans turn to radio and print publications for news far less frequently. In 2024, just 26% of U.S. adults say they often or sometimes get news in print, the lowest number our surveys have recorded.

  • When asked which of these platforms they prefer to get news on, 58% of Americans say they prefer a digital device, far higher than the share who prefer TV (32%). Relatively few Americans prefer radio (6%) or print (4%).

 

These survey results show that a shift from print and television to streaming sources has taken place with major implications.

 

News gathering and reporting in the US is fraught with tension between the press, the government, and the courts. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the major news organizations are privately owned, for-profit companies with commercial imperatives and marketing strategies.



In other words, market research, ratings competition, subscriptions, and advertising dollars – not to mention audience tastes and preferences – all have a part to play in the production of news. Not only that, but recent events show that the risk of self-censorship in reportage and the potential for politicians or media barons to exert undue influence are serious matters.

 

Owning the Airwaves

The major news networks are now subdivisions of global media oligopolies. Though variously configured, these corporations tend to be vertically integrated with international production and distribution networks, and horizontally diverse across media platforms (e.g., film, TV, radio, cable, internet, and print media). And the number of companies providing news, information, and entertainment for the vast majority of Americans has gotten smaller since the early 1980s, a result of media consolidation. In 1983, 50 companies owned 90 percent of the media consumed by Americans. By 2012, when with Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, just six companies controlled that 90 percent.

 

Media consolidation was made possible by

  • an explosion in communication technologies and services that enabled the flow of content across multiple platforms and

  • deregulation policies that relaxed restrictions on cross-media ownership, opening the gates to corporate mergers that raised antitrust concerns.[i]


Deregulation brought about a fundamental shift. From the start, US policy on commercial broadcasting was based on the principle of public ownership of the airwaves. To use the public airwaves, radio and television stations agreed to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), established in 1934, granted licenses to stations and regulated practices based on that standard in order “to promote diversity of ideas and viewpoints and assure balanced and responsive program service.”

 

The Fairness Doctrine

Later, the FCC established the Fairness Doctrine (1949) “to provide adequate coverage of public issues, and to ensure that coverage fairly represented opposing views.” That policy was abolished in 1987, in large part (if also ironically) because of media consolidation.

 

The FCC now argued that the proliferation of news sources via cable TV and the internet made the Fairness Doctrine outmoded. The apparent assumption is that just the availability of myriad channels and multiple delivery systems is sufficient to ensure a “diversity of ideas and viewpoints” to “assure balanced and responsive program service.”

 

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos

That was the purported rationale behind Jeff Bezos’s change to The Washington Post’s opinion section in the wake of the 2024 election. Bezos, owner of the Post, is also the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer with government contracts – like the mastermind of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).

 

Bezos described the new policy as being

 

“in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

 

In addition, he said:

 

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

 

There is some abstract truth in that. But as I noted in an earlier blog post, the proliferation of media helped propel American society into the post-truth age, where depending on their news source, people are being presented with very different realities.

 

The FCC also maintained that adherence to the Fairness Doctrine

 

“restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters ... [and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists.”

That too contains an element of truth. Baby boomers will remember the heyday of broadcast TV, when Walter Cronkite, anchor of CBS Evening News was cited in opinion polls as the “most trusted man in America.” The three major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) all had evening news programs that covered pretty much the same stories in pretty much the same way. Back then the audience was conceived as “an undifferentiated mass,” even though the standard for programming was centered on the “dominant, values of white, middle-class Americans.” The result was to largely exclude ethnic minorities and avoid treating any issues that “did not fit into the networks’ assumptions about the viewing audience.”

 

Stayed Tuned

I’m painting with broad strokes. Suffice it to say that deregulation opened the door to media consolidation; discarding the Fairness Doctrine paved the way for more one-sided, opinionated news. New digital communication technologies brought a cornucopia of news sources further fragmenting the media ecosystem, often along demographic and political lines.

 

All this points to a phenomenon known as cultural lag, when rapid technological advances outpace social and cultural norms and values. What we are seeing is that the growth of communication technologies in concert with media consolidation has outpaced cultural ideals, values, norms and principles, resulting in industry instability, institutional conflict, social fragmentation, and ethical dilemmas (e.g., free speech and censorship).

 

Is it any surprise then that in the 1970s, when cable TV was introduced in the United States, trust in the media was in the 68 to 72 percent range. Recent Gallup findings register the level of trust at 31 percent.

 

In the second part of this blog post, I ask, “How’s That Working Out For You?”



Photo Credits (in order of appearance)


Footnotes

[i] Media scholar Henry Jenkins aptly named this convergence of previously separate media in digital environments a “convergence culture.” Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2.



William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume, as the French put it), Patmos Rhodes.


 
 
 

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