While I would love to blame this on the Reagan administration’s getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the truth is that this was the end result of a long, slow process. I have seen issues of TV Guide from the late 1950s that were beginning to remark on how TV seemed to turn everything, even news programs, into entertainment. In a way, the availability of television, a visual medium, made us all voyeurs— looking for exciting and memorable images. And as more people watched, they then wanted to see something else that was exciting and memorable.
By the mid-1960s, studies began showing that people now had shorter attention spans than they did several decades earlier; and that meant if a TV program wanted to get good ratings, it had to find new ways to hold the audience’s attention. Programs that were serious and formal (and perceived as educational) did not get the ratings that faster-paced and exciting programs did. So, gradually, the idea that even a news broadcast should be delivered as a visual magazine, in order to hold the audience’s interest, became the dominant viewpoint. And by the 1980s, when the Fairness Doctrine officially ended, the process of making news more suitable for folks with short attention spans was already well underway.
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