This article examines the relationship between conservative discourse, racial politics, and broadcasting policy in the United States. It explores how conservative media personalities, pundits, and activists in 2009 claimed that efforts to increase broadcast diversity were, in actuality, attempts by liberals to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine—a policy that had required broadcasters to air both sides of controversial issues—through “the backdoor.” Reframing media diversity policies as masquerades to silence conservative voices, conservatives both denied the existence of barriers to participation for people of color and extended a narrative of conservative victimization. In contextualizing and analyzing the crusade against the “stealth Fairness Doctrine,” this article demonstrates how media policy discourse has operated as a site where conservative claims of injury occlude the continued existence of structural barriers to people of color and deny the importance of racial difference in the United States.
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