You could hear the coalition of social conservatives and Christian-right figures loud and clear: Big liberal broadcasters air shows offensive to all proper-thinking Americans and muscles must be flexed to get them canceled.

That rallying cry came in 1981, from the crusading pastors Donald Wildmon and Jerry Falwell and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who called for advertisers to boycott some 50 shows aired by the three broadcast networks. The objectionable programs in that case were not the Republican-baiting precincts of late-night television but the social taboo-breaking entertainments of Three’s Company, All in the Family and Knots Landing. 

The networks laughed off the so-called boycott, led in part by Falwell’s Moral Majority. An NBC spokesman called it censorship and decried the “coalition and its tactics.” The president of CBS Television scoffed that “as in the past, we intend to give the best possible information and entertainment to a very diverse American audience,” as most advertisers continued right on buying commercials. The idea that a number of activist conservatives, never mind the U.S. government, might have a say in what a network aired was laughable and far-fetched. That’s why news outlets shrugged at related grouses from a Republican leader — President Ronald Reagan — when he regularly bemoaned that TV news was too focused on the negative (”the constant downbeat,” as he put it in an interview in 1982). Of course conservatives would say that, they thought, and what could they do about it? Liberal-leaning television networks were a megalith, and First Amendment-protected besides.

No one was laughing last week when a combination of economic and governmental pressures got executives from those same networks to take a Charlie Kirk-commenting Jimmy Kimmel off the air for five days in all of the country (and a little longer in the Nexstar and Sinclair parts of the country), following the decision to eventually remove Stephen Colbert’s show from the airwaves permanently (as of next May). Now when Trump says “they’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad, see, I think that’s really illegal,” as he did last week, network executives don’t shrug. They act.

Recency bias and a Trumpian cloud of the sui generis can contribute to the belief that what’s happening now on broadcast television, with networks running scared and writing checks in their news divisions, and suspending or canceling performers from their entertainment ones, springs from this bizarre modern moment — a uniquely 2020’s phenomenon in which the real broadcast power rests not in Burbank or 30 Rock but D.C. and the trolling Internet, in he who give cues from Pennsylvania Avenue and those who look to him from across the pod-o-sphere.

And in one sense, of course, it is. We live in an unprecedented moment of modern media bullied by forces it once swatted away, thanks in no small part to the power and volatility of a chief executive. But the goals, tactics and personalities pressing hands to television necks didn’t descend fully formed on January 20, 2025. The efforts to eliminate television deemed offensive to conservatives, whether those offenses came on social or political grounds, stretches back nearly 45 years, to a playbook devised by figures like Wildmon and Falwell, carried out by a generation of successors from Brent Bozell to Dan Quayle, and now just reaching its latest, if admittedly most efficacious, rest stop with Brendan Carr and Donald Trump.

To those of us paying only sporadic attention, these historical moments can seem like isolated, even marginal events. But put all the dots on a page and a pattern emerges of a socio-religious movement using government to fight back against and control a media perceived as secular, liberal and anti-Republican. As the former conservative media veteran and influencer Matthew Sheffield notes, “Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood.” (Days ago, Trump echoed this line of thinking, calling Christianity “the most persecuted religion on the planet today” during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.)

That the biggest broadcast-television contretemps in years has come in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk seems no accident. Kirk, a proud Christian fundamentalist who once decried how Jews control “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it” represents a natural rallying cry for a four-decade movement to alter the allegedly anti-conservative course of American media. To ignore this history means not only missing how we arrived here but also, in a very real sense, overlooking where we might yet go.

Ronald Reagan had had enough. After a first term in which he felt that liberal television networks were unfair to him and his conservative agenda, the FCC commission he appointed decided in 1985, early in his invulnerable second term, to release a report decrying the legality and utility of the Fairness Doctrine, a 40-year-old bipartisan FCC policy that aimed to prevent baldly partisan takes on the airwaves. When a Democratic Congress responded by trying to pass a bill codifying it into law, Reagan vetoed the bill and his deregulation-fixated (but also indecency-patrolling) FCC commissioner, Mark Fowler led the commission to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.

The gesture at the time might have seemed wonky, paid little heed by cultural critics or entertainment executives. In fact it would change the country. The destruction of the doctrine led directly to the creation of the right-wing talk-radio program The Rush Limbaugh Show the next year and, less than a decade later, of Fox News — a political movement giving direct rise to a fiercely partisan and sometimes fact-agnostic right-wing media. Conservatives like Schlafly, unsuccessful in their early 80’s boycott, had their first taste of activist success on the airwaves.

It would hardly be the last. As the 1990’s kicked off and Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush sought a second term, his vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle embarked on perhaps the most famous late 20th-century right-wing effort to influence the airwaves when in a speech about the fictional newly single-mothered Murphy Brown he said that “bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong. … it doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” (Incidentally the alignment of evangelicals with the Republican party in the first place is actually not a given, and traces back to a decision Falwell made to hitch his ride to Reagan in exchange for support of the anti-abortion cause.)

Making sure no one on studio lots missed the message, the vice president said that “though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, and the national newspapers routinely jeer at [moral values], I think most of us in this room know that some things are good and other things are wrong. And now it’s time to make the discussion public.” (This was also an era when 70 million people tuned in to watch a sitcom episode on television, so some things do change.)

Hollywood pushed back. Creator Diane English released a statement that “if the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.” She even brought the controversy into the show’s fictional universe, with Brown watching the speech and inviting nontraditional families on her news program. “I’d like to introduce you to some people who might not fit into the vice president’s vision of a family,” she said, in many ways winning the round. Bush/Quayle were defeated. But a template was set for government wading into politics that would last years.

Few would lead it like L. Brent Bozell III and his Parents Television Council, a noisy organization that proved a formidable foe to free-speech advocates. The PTC marked the further formalization of what had often been a scattershot attempt to use the levers of culture and government to dictate what media companies could and couldn’t say. Founded by a man from right-wing royalty, the group’s fundamentalist hawkishness was baked in from the start. 

Bozell’s father was a Catholic ideologue who at times found himself at odds with noted conservative William F. Buckley (also his brother-in-law) for not going far enough to the right on culture-wars issues. The younger Bozell had previously founded a group called the Media Research Center, whose mission statement over its nearly 40 years sounds a lot like those forces that went after Kimmel. (“Designed to broadcast conservative values, culture, politics and expose liberal media bias,” its current mantra goes.)

The PTC set about carrying out their mission with a mix of zeal and cleverness, cloaking its mission for a more conservative-aligned media in the universally palatable tones of protecting kids. When the PTC would label Dawson’s Creek “the worst show” for two years running (“an almost obsessive focus on pre-marital sexual activity”), it was betraying a movement that wanted to suppress honest conversation about what teenagers were already discussing in favor of a sanitized, retrograde and certainly aspirational view of what growing up Millennial was really like. It can seem quaint or even funny in the post-Euphoria age, but the PTC’s role was hardly marginal.

To talk about television with the group at its D.C. offices was a little like encountering someone at an airport bar you learned was from your hometown only to realize they were also the town eccentric —  a superficial shared language concealing a different agenda beneath.  For years the group could carry on the illusion of a benignly non-governmental institution — they’re just looking out for the children! —  but the facade was ripped off in 2007 when the group joined the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee. The group’s then-head of government affairs Dan Isett joined that committee, and suddenly the PTC had a seat at the table.

For the next eight years, the PTC — a group that clearly had a social agenda — had the opportunity to whisper in the ears of commissioners from the FCC, a group that by both history and mandate clearly did not. The truth is the PTC, boosted by evangelical president George W. Bush, was pulling the levers of government long before that, successfully lobbying the FCC, for instance, to slap a $3.6 million fine on CBS and its stations for airing a 2004 Without a Trace episode that was too sexually suggestive for its liking. But direct advising of the FCC made it a lot harder to maintain the facade.

The PTC would eventually see its power dim, a function of changed leadership (Bozell is now the U.S. ambassador to South Africa) and a cable and eventually streaming culture that escaped easy legislative control.  But by now the battle had moved online to the even sharper spears of right-wing activists like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who would, in Red Scare fashion, regularly seek to deplatform the entertainment figures they believed were antithetical to their Republican cause. That approach had perhaps its biggest success in 2018 with Disney’s then-firing of James Gunn after he criticized Donald Trump, as Cernovich and Posobiec weaponized the director’s offensive tweets long known and apologized for to force the studio’s hand.

Most critically, the movement now had a strong ally in the most rarefied halls of power. Like an anti-abortion Falwell in the 1980’s harnessed Reagan’s need for votes, social conservatives in the late aughts realized they could now harness Trump’s need for ego strokes. Plus the new Republican president was much more willing to use the bully pulpit than the 1980’s White House occupant, something he did on behalf of social conservatives when he regularly decried anti-Christian bias and chose as his vice president a social conservative unafraid to attack shows like The View for their perceived religious insults. Many Christians of course also oppose Trump, often on religious grounds. But a strain of fundamentalist politics attached itself to Trump early in his first term, lending that administration a socially-conservative anti-media heft.

What the president didn’t have, however, were attack-dog loyalists at the highest levels of government, including the FCC. That would need to wait until his second term, when he could continue the work that had begun not just eight but 38 years earlier —  of making the airwaves as clear of anti-conservative voices as possible. And seek to slay Kimmel and Colbert amid Carr’s abundant anti-media threats.

Taken on their own, many of these historical moments could seem individuated, the function of a particular moment or crisis. But together a picture emerges of a long-standing movement eager to stop anyone who attacks a principle or personality its adherents hold dear. If you weren’t a regular viewer before this week, Kimmel regularly assails Trump’s Christianity, saying things like “if Trump met Jesus, he’d call him a loser, he’d tell him to get a haircut and put a shirt on.” Needless to say this particular strain of criticism — of Trump as a traitor to the Christian cause — does not go over well with evangelical MAGA members, who with Kimmel’s alleged belittling of the death of a Christian crusader last week saw both the furthering of a pattern and reason to cheer on its punishment.

When conservative activists first tried to make noise about changing the culture of television, executives quickly grasped their agenda and its dangers. In fact, the execs laid out the stakes very clearly, offering the kind of robust free-speech defenses that would rouse us today.

CBS Television senior vice president Gene Mater called Wildmon’s boycott “the greatest frontal assault on intellectual freedom this country has ever faced.” Legendary NBC Entertainment Brandon Tartikoff described it as “the first step toward a police state.” Tartikoff seemed to almost prophetically get how many more steps would soon be taken, all leading to Jimmy Kimmel going on an unplanned vacation and Stephen Colbert on a permanent one.

The familiarity of these efforts brings some reassurance; nothing is new under the media sun. But the starkness of difference in the reactions illustrates just how much has changed. Executive comments from back then would seem comically outlandish coming from the modern C-suite, long cowed into a Wall Street-flavored timorousness. (Imagine Bob Iger saying what Tartikoff did.)

And the familiarity demonstrates the sheer resilience of a movement to suppress anti-conservative speech — how, if it just keeps up long enough, it can eventually wear down the walls or find a Trumpian awl to crack its way in.

Wildmon died on the eve of 2024, his legacy assured. As Christianity Today eulogized, the pastor “organized and mobilized Christians across the country, convincing them that they should exert their combined economic power to influence what was on TV.”

“Before him, boycotts were primarily associated with the civil rights movement,” the obit went on to say. “Many conservatives considered them anti-capitalist, coercive, and un-American. Wildmon changed that.”

That was evident, most recently, with the Sinclair and Nexstar moves. And it will doubt not stop no matter the news Friday that the companies appeared to be calling an anti-Kimmel ceasefire. The influencer Sheffield’s comments from a few years ago that “almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals…this point is so important and so little understood” was accurate in 1981. Perhaps the biggest mistake Hollywood makes is looking at this singularly wild Trump moment and thinking that it won’t be true long after he is gone.