The American Exception

Seven in ten Americans once trusted the press. Today it's fewer than three in ten, the lowest number ever recorded.
The American Exception: Power of the Media traces exactly how that happened, one documented mechanism at a time. Not opinion. Not spin. The primary source record itself: the Supreme Court cases, the FCC orders, the SEC filings, the whistleblower testimony, the congressional votes, laid out chronologically and left for you to judge.

This volume follows the collapse of America's shared information system from Benjamin Franklin's 1731 printing standard through the Fairness Doctrine's rise and repeal, the birth of partisan cable news, the ownership chains stacked above your local newsroom, the algorithms that replaced human editors, and a 65-year fight over whether the government's own information apparatus should reach its own citizens, a fight still active in Congress as this book goes to press.
Along the way, the book documents:

• Why a 1949 FCC rule and a 1987 repeal still shape what you see on the news tonight
• How Facebook's own internal research, filed with the SEC under oath, described the mechanics of outrage
• The 1971 organizing manual whose tactics converged, without anyone copying anyone, with how modern media actually operates
• A 1972 Supreme Court case most Americans have never heard of, and the fifty-year fight in Congress to answer the question it left open