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April 23 - April 28, 2020
Republicans successfully argued that the Fairness Doctrine was an attack on journalistic freedom, and both Reagan and Bush thwarted efforts by Congress to keep the doctrine intact. This repeal happened as 24-hour
But the Fairness Doctrine still has an allure due to its now quaint stipulation that the TV news industry exists to serve ordinary Americans, as opposed to ordinary Americans existing to serve the TV news industry.
The public’s fate as camera fodder was cast in the 1990s, when news met entertainment, never to part, and the infotainment complex of cable media and reality TV was born.
When there wasn’t crime, cruelty would suffice. Abusive relationships were packaged as entertainment: Amy and Joey, Lorena and John Wayne, Clarence and Anita, OJ and Nicole,
You could turn away from the ritualized humiliation, or you could look at it straight on and say, “I would never let that happen to me.” You could tell yourself that later, when something you saw on tabloid TV struck too close to home—a rape or a beating or a breakdown or another hell sold as a commodity; you could repeat this refrain with a fervency to mask your fear. You would know on a gut level that your story would never be viewed with sympathy, because sympathy was for suckers now. Sympathy was a junk bond emotion. Sympathy was reserved for only
the most virtuous victims—and even then, they always implied, it must have been the victim’s fault.
In the 1990s, to guest star in someone else’s tragedy was regarded as a worthy pursuit, amusing and potentially profitable. You could offer yourself up to the cameras, you could be the prize in a new kind of human game show—as long as you weren’t there to make friends, as long as the monetary payoff outweighed the moral loss, as long as you could live like a caricature.
As a twenty-year-old college dropout, Epstein was hired by Barr’s father, Donald Barr, to teach math at Dalton, the New York private all-girls high school where the elder Barr served as headmaster.
