People ask where was the start of the division in this country? Was it Facebook? how about cable news?
Well having lived through these times, I will make a guess. Let me know if it makes sense.
The reason we are where we are today is.......FM radio.
What?!
Yes- if you go back and trace back where this division came from, it had it's roots in the invention of FM radio. The law of unintended consequences.
Now there have always been political differences. The question is how do they get amplified to the extent they have been. That word - amplified - is part of AM (amplitude modulation )
Up into the 60's 99% or radio was AM. It crossed the country and the signal could be heard far and wide.
In 1945 Barry Gray is credited as the "inventor" of talk radio, but it would be many decades before this would dominate as most of AM radio was used to broadcast music and sports.
When FM radio first came on the scene it was a novelty - the first real stereo stations only came about in the early 1960's. It was the rock music explosion in the late 60's that spawned the birth of the AOR station, and music moved from AM to FM. Along with music came Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 which led to stations moving to the new FM band where l assume licenses were easy to come by compared to AM.
This left a vacuum on AM that needed to be filled. Top 40 radio was dying as cars equipped with FM radios could broadcast better quality sound. One by one stations went to a talk format. I grew up in New York so WMCA went first, followed by WABC when it could no longer hold onto it's top 40 kingdom.
WMCA was a bastion of conservative radio with Bob Grant leading the way, but with the liberal Alex Bennet as a foil. But Alex got booted with the acquisition of Yankee Baseball broadcast and found himself over on FM along with the very liberal WBAI.
Even in high school, it was interesting to see the camps starting to form, the conservatives vs the liberals with a somewhat common ground with Jean Shepard on WOR as the storyteller.
This went a long for a while as a standoff until the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Now considered quaint and a little naïve, it both kept both sides in check, but was not above being used politically. The demise in 1987 led to the hiring of one Rush Limbaugh. Rush was the patron saint of modern talk radio, but with a twist. I wrote about this in 2017 the technique of diminishing exaggerations. With this technique he took seemingly minor issues end events and expanded them to life and death matters. I did not mind his show, actually agreed with some of his economic positions, but it was his Climate Change denying and then his accusation of Hillary Clinton having murdered Vince Foster - with no proof, that turned me off (pun intended) for good. It took me years to convince my bother-in-law, but eventually, even he broke away from Rush.
However, the die was set. Newspapers, where headlines were needed to sell papers, threw integrity out the window. Papers/Magazines like the National Enquirer were no longer the outliers. Throw in cable networks and it was easier to divide then unite.
You would think the Internet would be the salvation, with information at your finger tips. But that section 230, which conservatives want to repeal, actually protects them by allowing all sorts of conspiracy theories to propagate. Here is a test. Search for ""hard evidence" found by Rep. James Comer" and you will find page after page of the claim, without finding any proof. It is just the echo chamber of conservatives sites repeating the same thing.
So how do we fix this? How do we restore sanity to our news cycle and get back to at least being able to sort out what is true and what is false? How do we become united in solving problems and not in blaming each other? It might take the generation who grew up during the time of change to pass away and a new generation who grew so cynical and distrustful of what they saw to take the helm. Until they get corrupted too. But we can hope.
