I've seen this claim before, but I'm unconvinced. Do you think that under the "Fairness" regime, things really were fair?
I'm thinking of the way that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were treated by the debate commission, where fairness is claimed to be in effect.
And thanks no doubt to a bit of Google AI, here he is on the topic, discussing how it was back in 1980 as well as more generally: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/02/20/anyone_remember...
As the Wikipedia article notes, this has nothing to do with the equal-time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule about which I'm expressing no opinion.
But it still seems that "fairness" is BS. First, I'm quite sure it can't pass Constitutional muster on the web. It was permitted back in the 60s predicated on the FCC managing a scarce resource (broadcast frequency spectrum). But for practical purposes, Internet bandwidth is unlimited, and it couldn't get away with this. Also, this seems little more than a nod. For any given issue, there's a kaleidoscope of differing ideas. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to engineer a compliant broadcast that still manages to completely exclude specific undesired ideas, by including other views as compensating balance.
Rush Limbaugh is crap, and I won't watch him. But do you really want to live in a country where that's actually forbidden? I don't.
You say we "can't", but we demonstrably do have such a press. And you're 100% correct to discern the totalitarian nature of it.
Which is why alternative sources have become so important, and as more people's "Pravda breakers" trip (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12921328) the less important this old press becomes. Look no further than the former "Newspaper of Record", it's post-election front page, it's crashing revenue, and why I call it "Carlos Slim's personal blog".
Historically it started with Reagan's zapping of the "'Fairness' Doctrine", which allowed right of center talk radio to become a thing, which I'm sure helped prime things for rise of the Internet. Drudge's 1998 reporting of a story spiked by Newsweek (sold in 2010 for a dollar and assumption of its liabilities) clearly marked this was a decisive change ... and yet our "press", MSM, this whole old establishment, seems determined to stay the course.
Which, just citing the two financial bits above, looks like a path to oblivion (although many of us are predicting they'll get direct government support soon enough, but that won't get them readers), and therefore self-correcting in, say, the medium term. So I'm not quite so alarmed, as long as the Internet stays free of censorship at the IP and maybe DNS levels.