Getty Images 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. Related Stories TV The Ed Sullivan Theater After Colbert: Last Days of a Late Night Icon Business When Fox Made the Wrong Bets -- and Wound Up In a Hostile Takeover 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. Jerry Falwell speaking at an event in 1981. UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images 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