This stuff has been going on as long as I can remember.

Even back in high-school I used to listen to late night radio - this was waaayyy before Art Bell’s time. At night usually religious broadcasters of one sort or another would get into JBS type stuff.

With the advent of cable TV the nuts found an outlet via the local community service channel.

Then with 500 cable channels everyone had to compete more intensely, so the barons of media began dipping into the nut-pool to provide entertainment. Competing with X-treme sports and Playboy and MTV and HBO etc means that cable “news” is always going to be driven more and more x-treme.

So I expect this to continue and even get worse.