Radwell is the author of “ American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation ” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America. This is the fifth entry in a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.
The late 19th century in our country marked the height of yellow journalism, a style of newspaper reporting that prioritized sensationalism over facts. Presenting little in the way of legitimately well-researched news, papers of that era focused on eye-catching headlines to drive sales. Stories of the day were rife with scandal-mongering, crime, sex and violence. Even “legitimate” news stories were full of outrageous exaggerations. Historians argue to this day about the role of yellow journalism in pushing the United States into the Spanish American War.
In the early part of the 20th century, however, the tide seemed to shift. Some newspaper owners, responding to consumer thirst for more dependable information, realized that accurate investigative reporting could stimulate good business. Moreover, some like Joseph Pulitzer believed newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society. After purchasing the New York World in 1883, Pulitzer started replacing the many sensational stories with real journalistic coverage. By the time of his death in 1911, the World was a widely respected publication.
In the first decade of the new century, newly formed press associations began championing higher education. In 1908, the same year as the founding of the National Press Club, the University of Missouri opened the first school dedicated to journalism, followed by Columbia University in 1912 (funded by a $2 million grant from Pulitzer). With other schools adding journalism to their curriculum, the new field of study was defined as a process of collecting, processing and disseminating information in the public interest.
Now sanctioned by universities, the journalism industry could teach acceptable behavior and establish credentials, and also promulgate high ethical norms such as accuracy, balance, impartiality and truthfulness, independent of any commercial or political interests. It was nothing less than the birth of a profession.
Over the next decade, the field further distinguished itself with a robust sense of social responsibility towards the general public, good governance and democracy. At its foundation were two principle underpinnings; the first was designating a relentless focus on the pursuit of truth as the center of the value hierarchy. Second, the revolutionary idea of erecting a “Chinese wall” between the owner and the editor of a newspaper. News would no longer be shaped to suit the partisan interests of press owners, but rather would be determined by trained nonpartisan professionals, using judgment and skills honed in journalism schools.
So what happened that led us from the days of Walter Cronkite to the present era in which the autonomy of professional journalism seems to be vanishing faster than the Amazon rainforest. Here are the three developments of the recent decades that proved pivotal:
- The regulatory framework was rescinded. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s FCC repealed the “fairness doctrine,” which required the holders of broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints (some argued that as cable news spread, the doctrine seemed to be rendered obsolete).
- News got replaced by (sensational) entertainment. In the face of the rising costs of accurate investigative news gathering, Roger Ailes pioneered a new business model at the Fox News Channel. This “winning” model, in which costly journalism is replaced by inexpensive pundit blowhards, caught on and became highly attractive to all media owners. The alternative path for many other television and radio stations was the outright elimination of news.
- The great training camp for fresh “up and coming” journalists withered away. The growth of the internet proved to be a death sentence for the money-maker in the print business — “the classifieds,” which kept afloat thousands of local newspapers across the United States. The unintended consequence: The vital training ground where young journalists newly out of school could learn the profession receded as town and regional newspapers closed. In fact, the AP reports that the nation has lost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists in the last 20 years.
Today what is left is a media landscape where the search for eyeballs (or clicks) is the raison d’être, which routinely trumps accuracy, data or any form of verified information. The subscription model has become scarce and in the maelstrom of advertising that remains, most Americans have given up the pursuit of truth. The alternative is to create and maintain your own unsullied version of the truth in your chosen bubble.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.