The best way to honor Charlie Kirk’s memory is to bring back the fairness doctrine, a requirement for broadcasters to feature politically balanced programming as a condition of holding a broadcasting license. It was first imposed in 1949 and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission.

At the time, three major broadcasters — ABC, CBS, and NBC — dominated television audiences. To prevent the trio from using their effective monopoly for one-sided coverage of controversial issues, the doctrine required producers to create content that included opposing viewpoints. Failure to do so could and sometimes did result in the revocation of a broadcasting license. For 38 years, the doctrine was the rule of the road for television and radio. It was still in force when I first began working as a producer for John McLaughlin in 1986. McLaughlin stayed on air from 1982 until his death in 2016. At its peak, his signature creation, a nationally-broadcast weekly talk show called The McLaughlin Group, routinely beat out network competitors to top the Sunday news program ratings.

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With an audience of between 4 million and 6 million viewers weekly, the show’s format embodied fairness doctrine requirements. The “Group” was composed of two liberals, two conservatives, and host McLaughlin. His panels included journalists from across the spectrum, spanning the progressive The Nation to the conservative Human Events. Video introductions to the issues under discussion carefully balanced their content. While the discussions on McLaughlin’s set occasionally erupted into heated shout fests, he was always careful to make sure all the panelists were heard.

McLaughlin enforced his own concept of equal time for the panelists by scrutinizing the prior week’s transcript to see if any one journalist got more talk time than others. Verbose offenders were admonished by a producer, often me, to be more succinct in their commentary. Tense and deeply felt exchanges on air existed alongside true friendships and mutual respect off set, like that between conservative Tony Blankley and liberal Eleanor Clift. In short, the show reflected the sort of civil debate and agreements to disagree that Kirk brought to college campuses.

But with the growth of talk radio and cable television in the mid-1980s, the fairness doctrine seemed obsolete. A multiplicity of viewpoints became widely available, shattering the need to guard against broadcasting monopolies. Opponents of the doctrine argued that it had infringed on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights all along and was no longer necessary. In 1987, the FCC stopped enforcing the doctrine. Congress attempted to revive it legislatively, but President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill. 

Over the ensuing 38 years, the generation of journalists trained in the doctrine of presenting balanced news has aged out of the profession. They have been replaced by graduates of journalism schools that long ago stopped teaching students to respect basic tenets of fairness and balance and are openly hostile to the concept of objectivity itself. Narratives and “my truth” became the building blocks of content creation for television and radio producers. The concept of balanced reporting faded away.

What no one foresaw back in 1987, when the fairness doctrine was jettisoned, were two corrosive trends that have undermined civil society: the siloization of news consumers and the cultural capture of the entertainment industry. Both trends were driven and magnified by technological changes in news and entertainment consumption.

With more and more news consumers exposed to only one viewpoint, often expressed in outrageous oversimplification or deliberate misrepresentation of opposing viewpoints, polarization has increased dangerously. It has given rise not only to left-wing authoritarianism and cancel culture but also to the much more ominous phenomenon the Rutgers Network Contagion Research Institute terms “assassination culture.”

In an impassioned piece in Spiked last week, Heather Mac Donald documents the ghoulish rationalizations for Kirk’s murder advanced by many academics and college administrators. Almost despairingly, she questions whether reconciliation between conservatives and progressives can ever be possible, given the Left’s embrace of assassination culture. Her solution, long-term reform of colleges and universities, will take at least a generation.

Meanwhile, the Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes (D-NY) and Marjorie Taylor Greenes (R-GA) of the country will keep going to extremes because there’s not only an audience for extremism, but producers and platforms that crave extremism to keep and grow and profit from those audiences. The 21st-century media model of catering to a siloed audience and becoming more and more partisan is an unanticipated outcome of the decision to sunset the fairness doctrine.

If we want a more civil society, the answer is a 21st-century fairness doctrine. Bringing balance back into broadcasting (and introducing it to podcasting) is the fastest way to lower the temperature in American politics. It will expose audiences to more than one side of an issue. It will force broadcasting conglomerates to reshape their business models for news and entertainment, hire more staff and talent reflecting viewpoint diversity, and diminish the corrosive effect of siloization.

Kirk lost his life trying to show that reasoned debate between ideological opponents was the right path. Recent studies and classroom experiments exposing students to viewpoint diversity show that, despite the polarized state of our society, educating students on opposing views and encouraging thoughtful discussion produces greater tolerance. 

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Firing the Jimmy Kimmel’s of the broadcasting world isn’t the answer, but requiring broadcasters (and podcasters) to present a balanced range of views on their programs would definitely end one-sided grandstanding. The best way to memorialize Kirk’s belief that all sides of an argument should be civilly debated would be for Congress to enact a 21st-century fairness doctrine.

In Kirk’s name, let’s bring it back.

John B. Roberts II served in President Ronald Reagan’s White House and was an international political strategist before becoming executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. He is an artist and author. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.