Hero of the right, President Ronald Reagan, is no hero to Kennedy. "He had the gift of making people feel comfortable with their own prejudices."
Many of the problems of today, Kennedy traced back to actions taken by Reagan. Kennedy believes the American people are fed a media diet of right-wing propaganda, and it "all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public-trust assets, like air and water, and broadcasters could be licensed to use them" but they must use them in the public interest and to advance democracy.If the Fairness Doctrine was still in place, "You could not have a Fox News," he said, nor a Rush Limbaugh, for that matter. But the doctrine is gone and Fox and Limbaugh are here. Quoting Pew Research, Kennedy said, 30 percent of Americans now get their news from talk radio, which is 90 percent dominated by the right. Another large number of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News, which Kennedy clearly believed would be better named Faux News.
Kennedy continues droning on with his typical unoriginal Marxian analysis about how multinational corporations control the flow of information:
Kennedy said as a result of that doctrine being abolished, six giant multinational corporations control all 14,000 radio stations in the States, almost all 6,000 TV stations, 80 percent of the newspapers, all billboards, and most of the Internet information services. News departments are corporate profit centers with their only obligations being to the shareholders and not to the public.
Left unmentioned was a certain multinational corporation known as GE which provides us with the far left rantings on MSNBC. In fact the big corporations known as NBC, CBS, and ABC are all far left of center in their coverage of the news. However, that information won't stop Kennedy from his robotic rants on this topic and how he yearns for a return of the Fairness Doctrine to put a halt to contrary viewpoints.
