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October 23, 2022

There was a time when what was acceptable in media was generally policed.  This was the time of the three major networks, who were then accused of controlling public discussion.

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Up until the ’90s, ABC, NBC, and CBS ruled the roost, and they tended to keep extreme viewpoints off of the air.  Neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists never got a hearing.  The media were sanitized, to be sure.  In the late 1980s, the FOX network started rising, but it followed a similar practice.  The only difference is that FOX paraded itself as conservative at that time.

It was not a total suppression of free speech — though some claimed it was — but it was a sort of gatekeeping.  Dissident/extremist opinions could not get a hearing.

Some claimed that the media were controlled by the Jews, but with the arrival of FOX — which was owned by the Murdochs, a Christian family — that claim no longer held up.  Yet the ADL (Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith) addressed the matter in 1999.

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Steven G. Kellman, a professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio, wrote … “[o]f the 100 most powerful people in the industry according to a recent survey by Premiere, most, including the top 12, are Jewish,” but observed, “Though individual Jews control Hollywood, Jewishness does not.” In fact, Hollywood studios are publicly owned corporations and motion pictures are made by the efforts of individual men and women, some of whom are Jewish, many of whom are not.

The ADL sort of shot itself in the foot with that explanation. While it was true that the Jewish executives were not pushing Jewishness, they could still be open to the charge of steering the conversation.  All of that came to an end in the mid-’90s.

With the advent of the internet, anyone could publish what he wanted and get it out to the world.  All one had to do was set up a website, which was far cheaper than publishing booklets.  Search engines made it easy for the public to find such questionable information.

Neo-Nazi websites started sprouting up like weeds.  The cat was out of the bag.  Prior to the internet, it was hard to find such stuff.  With the internet, one could find such stuff in complete anonymity.

Then, in 1996, the U.S. government passed Section 230 of the  United States Communications Decency Act, which insulated web hosting providers and companies from much of the legal consequences of what was on their servers.  In plain terms, the internet was given a free pass.

So the internet became the Wild West.