What the Laken Riley Act Tells Us About the Media

Media polarization after the fairness doctrine, Ronald Reagan, and deregulation has not been good for America.

In February of 2024, Augustana University Nursing student Laken Riley was abducted and murdered while jogging, sparking almost immediate congressional action and the passing of a law bearing her name. What set Riley’s tragic murder apart from others was that Jose Ibarra, the perpetrator, was an illegal immigrant. Many critics of then-President Joe Biden pointed to Riley’s murder as evidence of Biden’s mismanagement of the southern border.

Through Riley’s murder and a handful of otherwise isolated incidents nationally, speculation about a “migrant crime wave” began to appear in the media, despite the fact that there was no evidence of this crime wave existing. According to data from 2022 (the most recent data available), immigrants, legal or otherwise, commit around three times fewer crimes than native-born American citizens. Why, then, did the term “migrant crime” catch on? Right-of-center broadcasters, newspapers, and other news media played a significant role. Beginning in August of 2024, they published dozens of stories with inflammatory titles like “Mother of migrant crime victim 'completely' blames Biden-Harris admin” and “Don’t be gaslighted, New York: Migrant crime is real.” Polls indicate that these claims significantly affected the issues American voters thought to be important in the 2024 election, with 61% of all voters considering immigration policy “very important” in deciding who to vote for. It would be naive to say that the public’s perception of a “migrant crime wave” didn’t skew the data. It’s not hard to understand both how these claims came about and how they managed to stoke partisan divides when you look at the data: during the height of the panic about “migrant crime”, Fox News aired around 1,000 segments in a single week intended to show how “in Joe Biden’s America, unvetted illegal aliens and deranged criminals are free to roam the streets and terrorize everyday Americans.” This is not the sign of healthy discourse; it is the sign of a propaganda campaign. However, these tactics are by no means exclusive to Fox News, or even the political right. In fact, numerous erroneous claims were made and repeated about current President Trump’s campaign and the assassination attempt against him by left-wing news organizations. Misrepresenting the truth is a tactic that’s become common across the political spectrum. Deliberate misinformation and biased coverage of newsworthy events have become endemic problems in today’s political environment.

Today, in a media landscape where news organizations compete with each other for viewership with little oversight, misinformation and outright lies are used to play on America’s volatile and divided political culture for ratings. In his 2016 report on media bias for the Atlantic Council, Slanted and Self-Serving Media, John Raidt explores the root causes behind the media’s current hyper-polarized state, before concluding that “much of the media seek not so much to inform as to provoke, to advocate rather than perform their adversarial duties” (48). Publishing biased and hyper-partisan news coverage is an extremely efficient method for media organizations to generate revenue, as it exploits the human tendency towards confirmation bias, where people tend to believe information that confirms their existing beliefs, even if the information is provably false. We often like to think that we are immune to propaganda and our own internal biases. However, such assumptions ignore the fact that frequently, politics isn’t about policy, but instead about teams. Thus, people are susceptible to media coverage that twists factual information so long as it makes the “other side” look bad. News media companies have realized this, and have made massive amounts of money promoting partisan revisions of the truth to their audiences. As Raidt observes, this creates a vicious cycle, where “the parties and politicians will reap the material benefits of the factional animosity…in the form of bigger donations and stauncher allies,” and “the media will convert the drama and ugliness into higher ratings and more revenue” (53). If anything, this issue has only become more pronounced in the eight years since Raidt’s report was published. Worse still, there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to media polarization. However, it wasn’t always this way. To understand why, we must look back to the fairness doctrine and its demise during the Reagan administration.

Before it was repealed in 1987, the United States Federal Communications Committee (“FCC”) enforced what was known as the “fairness doctrine”, which functioned as a national code of ethics for broadcasting companies. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, significant efforts were made by media reform movements to push for laws that would regulate broadcasting companies. According to Victor Pickard, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, following the purge of several left-wing voices from public radio, a coalition of “grass-roots activists, labor unions and New Deal policymakers” was the first to raise concerns about the high levels of “concentrated corporate power within an extremely commercialized media system”. At the time, a vast majority of radio stations were controlled by three major corporations: CBS, NBC, and ABC. Many media reform advocates feared the consequences of allowing increasingly large media conglomerates to operate with very little regulation. Many lawmakers shared their concerns, believing these three major news networks had the potential to “misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda,” as there was nothing preventing them from giving unfair support to a single political candidate or party, or misrepresenting factual information. To prevent this from occurring, the fairness doctrine was enacted. It required that “broadcast networks devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance”. Essentially, the fairness doctrine required broadcasters to provide good-faith analysis of more than one side of an issue, or else their broadcast license would be revoked. While the push for media reform did not end with the passing of the fairness doctrine, the FCC considered it to be a vital tool in maintaining a healthy media environment, and anti-segregation activists relied on the fairness doctrine to combat racist broadcasting. Generally, as Pickard notes, the doctrine “protected the public rights of audiences to diverse information,” which is undoubtedly crucial in creating healthy political discourse.

However, despite being broadly supported by Congress and described by the FCC as the “single most important requirement of operation in the public interest,” many politicians – including the extremely controversial North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms – fervently opposed the doctrine. Helms, in particular, wanted the ability to openly advocate his policy positions–including his opposition to extending the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts–on mainstream radio and television programs without challenges from the FCC. Meanwhile, some others, such as Freedom of Expression Foundation founder Craig R. Smith, saw the doctrine as “counter-productive and unconstitutional” due to the perceived “chilling effect” it had on broadcasters (484). Smith and others opposed to the doctrine on freedom of speech grounds argued that broadcasters would be incentivized to avoid polarizing topics to prevent coming into conflict with the FCC’s regulations. Smith was involved in a campaign to repeal the fairness doctrine during the 1980s, which argued that the doctrine violated the First Amendment rights of broadcasting companies.

Notably, Smith’s First Amendment argument was largely without merit, as the fairness doctrine had been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court. For example, in its 1969 opinion in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the FCC did not violate right-wing radio broadcaster Red Lion’s First Amendment rights after the FCC revoked its broadcasting license for verbally attacking a journalist on air. This was because, the Court opinion stated, the “airwaves are a scarce resource,” and that “the resulting scarcity of stations creates the danger that some points of view might never be aired”. By mandating that broadcasters provide fair coverage of multiple issues and perspectives, the fairness doctrine solves the problem of scarcity, providing the public with diverse viewpoints as opposed to one-sided partisan messaging. The Court argued that the fairness doctrine – or any similar regulation – was both constitutional and even necessary for the public good. Following this ruling, opponents of the fairness doctrine had to take their grievances directly to someone sympathetic to their cause in the White House. They would find such a sympathetic figure in Ronald Reagan.

Among other things, Reagan is known for his sweeping economic reforms, which reduced government spending, cut taxes, and–most importantly here–dramatically reduced government regulations across the board. Based on this distaste for regulation, Reagan was almost certainly ideologically opposed to the fairness doctrine or any similar attempt at media reform or regulation. In 1987, the Reagan-appointed FCC chairman, Dennis Patrick, repealed the fairness doctrine. In support of his actions, he argued that the doctrine was an overstep of government authority and a violation of the First Amendment. It’s worth noting that Patrick’s argument was based on his own interpretation of Constitutional law, which ran counter to the existing legal precedent set in Red Lion v. FCC, which recognized the fairness doctrine as Constitutional and an extremely beneficial policy–even in its most extreme form. Patrick’s actions drew the extreme ire of Congress. According to the Reagan Presidential Library, “the FCC vote was opposed by members of Congress who said the FCC had tried to ‘flout the will of Congress,’” with Congress later denouncing the decision to repeal the fairness doctrine as “wrongheaded, misguided and illogical.” Several months later, Congress passed a bill that would have functionally enshrined the fairness doctrine into national law. However, Reagan vetoed the bill– shutting the door on any sort of similar media reform law.

In hindsight, to call the decision to repeal the fairness doctrine a mistake would be a massive understatement. The removal of the anti-bias protections provided by the fairness doctrine was a major contributing factor in the development of our current political climate. In 2016, Emory University found that “Democrats and Republicans have never been as divided as they are today” (54). In almost nine years, with two contentious presidential elections and one coup attempt, since that report was published, partisan division among Americans has only gotten worse. It would be naive to say that the repealing of the fairness doctrine has not contributed to our political climate. The internet has further exacerbated this issue, as so much information is shared not just through “traditional” means–television, radio, and print–but through social media, a medium that oftentimes cannot be effectively regulated. This is not to say that nothing can be done to heal these partisan divides: the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Red Lion v. FCC supports the conclusion that the fairness doctrine, or any other similar regulation, is constitutional. After all, as stated in the Oxford Journal of Comparative Law, Red Lion established that the rights of viewers and listeners are more important than the rights of the broadcasters. The Court in Red Lion that the entire purpose of the fairness doctrine was to protect a common good in the form of the media, “the use of which must be regulated to avoid deconstruction of its value to all, and that it is the need for public regulation which entails priority for the interests of viewers and listeners over those of broadcasters” (Fisch, 520). Yet now, without the fairness doctrine, the value of the public good that is national media has been eroded due to its almost total deregulation. It’s hard to say what any legislation that would effectively regulate modern mass-media companies would look like, but that doesn’t mean that Americans must be content with the level of partisan bias and misinformation present in our media. Something must be done. We cannot meaningfully combat misinformation or restore a healthy political climate without restoring the fairness doctrine, or reintroducing media regulations in some other way.

For as long as they have existed, media companies have been using the most effective methods available to them to turn engagement into profit. Since the repealing of the fairness doctrine, a move motivated by Reagan’s anti-regulation agenda, these companies have been free to create media that is increasingly propagandistic in nature. Americans still believe, in part because of the Reagan administration’s decision to repeal the fairness doctrine, that any regulation on the media constitutes an attack on the First Amendment rights of companies. This stance has had disastrous effects on the American political climate: the sensationalism, bias, and misinformation prevalent in the media today is a direct result of the industry’s unregulated profit-seeking. We have allowed what should be a public good, something that is essential to our democracy, to fall into the hands of those who are incentivized to sacrifice quality and veracity if it means higher margins at the end of the fiscal year.

It has been almost a year since the murder of Laken Riley, and the anti-migrant rhetoric that emerged following the murder has only intensified. Donald Trump, a man who refers to illegal migrants as “animals” that are “poisoning the blood of our country”, has begun his second term as the President of the United States. The escalation of the harmful and divisive rhetoric in discussions of immigration was no doubt pushed along by the media storm following Riley’s murder, with politicians and pundits supporting the lie that immigrants were disproportionately criminals. On January 29th, 2025, the Laken Riley Act passed into law, with Republican lawmakers championing the bill as a way to crack down on “migrant crime”. The bill has helped to fulfill Trump’s promise of an en masse deportation of “criminal” migrants, a deportation campaign that is currently in effect. Around half of all people deported in the first week of deportations in Chicago alone had no criminal background or charges against them. What, though, is the wider significance of the Laken Riley Act? It is indicative of our current political climate: so much of the news media we consume is not designed to inform but to inflame. The profit motive that drives media conglomerates does not have the health of our political climate in mind, which makes peddling misinformation lucrative. Politicians can gain social capital by shaping misinformation into a policy agenda until their level of public support lands them in office. They will then support and pass bills based on their policies, which were themselves shaped by media misinformation instead of actual issues. In other words, we have allowed willful misinformation spread by profit-seeking media conglomerates to directly influence our politics due to the deregulation of a public good. This is not a recipe for a functioning democracy.