This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, November 30th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Trust in media is at near historic lows, and some people don't even trust traditional

media outlets these days to get them a basically fair take on, well, anything.

But perhaps that's not altogether new.

In his new book, the radio write how a band of broadcasters took on the federal government

and built the modern conservative movement.

Paul Matzko details radio's former fairness doctrine and how fears of that doctrine both real and imagined helped

give birth to a new conservative movement.

Yeah, I had to resist the impulse when writing the book to put Fairness doctrine in quotation marks every time I put it in because it's you know that critics of it at the time like to call it the unfairness doctrine

so to accomplish the opposite purpose.

But what it was in the 1950s,

progressive broadcast reformers,

well-intentioned, naive, but well-intentioned reformers

said, we need to have two things.

We need to have radio stations which at the time in the early 50s were dominated by the big

networks, your CBS's, that kind of thing.

They're dominated by the big networks and the big networks didn't like to have too much

controversial speech on politics and current events.

It was all very an-adide, middle-of-the-road consensus politics.

And so the reformer said,

we want them to speak into politics, into elections,

...