I find that it's always interesting to THEN consider, okay -- while there's no centralized board or anything -- what does e.g. American censorship go after?
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For example, during the AIDs epidemic, Reagan used his social and political power to effectively ban the mention of that word on primetime television (remember, not only was he the president of the United States, he was also once the president of the Screen Actors Guild). Not even Will And Grace, a 1998 sitcom about a gay couple, was allowed to mention AIDs or HIV at all in its 11 season run!
He's also the reason movies in the 80s got away with so much more than they did even in the 90s, when cultural values themselves hadn't changed that much comparatively. the MPAA board was completely sized up, what was allowed to be said on TV was changed, and seemingly arbitrary rules put in place ("Fuck" can be said only once in a PG-13 movie or once-an-episode in certain network shows ONLY if it's non-sexual). This is why you have classic kids movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, PG) that if they were re-released today would be either R or possibly not even allowed to be shown a wide release in theaters.
And you know, now we have the whole "banned books" things in (my home state of) Texas, Florida, etc, which almost exclusively censors books with deal with LGBTQ and race issues from even being available in a library to be checked out by a curious student on their own time (including, in a Dallas suburb and throughout Virginia, Anne Frank's Diary).
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/entertainment/80s-hollywood-a...
St Elsewhere might have been the first in 1983. Golden Girls, Trapper John MD. There was plenty of hesitancy to deal with a difficult subject, and the gay element compounded the difficulty (openly gay characters were not common). But to suggest it was at the direction of the Federal Govt is totally absurd. Reagan was as disliked and mocked almost as much as Trump was.
Also, your examples are not particularly illustrative. Reagan did not even publicly mention AIDs until 1985 (though reporters had been asking him about it since 1982), when it first started to become worrisome to straight people (and still created no presidential task force or dedicated funding until 1987). Golden Girls mentioned it after that. So did Trapper John, MD. St. Elsewhere was notable precisely because it was one of the only primetime shows that did when it was exclusively thought of as a "gay disease".
To truly understand how insidious Reagan's administration was, when doctors were ringing the alarm bells in press conferences years prior (and the next, and the next, and the next...) Reagan's response was to ask any reporter if they were gay to a crowd of laughter and move on. In fact, Nancy Reagan even arguably personally condemned movie star Rock Hudson, who was a personal friend of theirs, to an earlier death by explicitly refusing his appeal to have him admitted into a retroviral trial in France because they did want to be associated with the gay community in any way.
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/03/nancy-reagan...
It's really not too big of a jump to make the connection between a man who basically started the "moral majority" movement and created virtually all modern film and tv regulation to this day (aside from the MPAA, he also repealed the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which basically is what gave rise to the giant split in media today, and really all major legislation around what can/cannot be shown on TV/in theaters that still persists to this day), would actively use his power to discourage AIDs from being talked about in media, just as he did Communism, anything non-nuclear family, and really anything that fell outside his bubble of conservative values.
This was the man who effectively started the war on Hollywood. He came from Hollywood. He knew the studio execs, the donors, the investors (they funded him!), it wouldn't take much for them to listen to him.
But you can't cite a single one? That's pretty suspicious.
"It's really not too big of a jump"
So in a very long winded way, you are saying you made it up and have no evidence? wow...
It's like in 20 years if someone were to say that because neither Trump or Biden explicitly passed a singular law requiring you to work from home that they had no effect on the rise of remote work during Covid. That's what "It's really not too big of a jump" is meant to illustrate– that one thing directly leads to another. Obviously presidential policy isn't just purely laws. But here's a collection of links from a wide variety of sources (including his own foundation) that support my point. There's hundreds, if not thousands, more.
If I'm wrong, please provide _me_ some concrete proof that Reagan had nothing to do with US's societal paralysis and suppression of the AIDs epidemic, because I think that's the point that more obviously needs defending.
https://www.wpr.org/how-reagan-helped-usher-new-conservatism... https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/the-other-time-a-us-presid... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230616196_9 https://www.reaganfoundation.org/education/curriculum-and-re... https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric https://daily.jstor.org/ronald-reagan-the-first-reality-tv-s... https://www.vox.com/ad/18175876/ronald-nancy-reagan-white-ho... https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/beloved-media/ https://www.press.umich.edu/331707/the_president_electric http://www.wiu.edu/cas/history/wihr/pdfs/Banwart-MoralMajori... https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/29/20826545/hoberman-make... https://lithub.com/ronald-reagan-presided-over-89343-deaths-...
In fact, even the article you yourself linked (aptly titled Hollywood’s struggle to deal with AIDS in the ’80s) supports my point:
"So perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that it wasn’t until the mid to late ’80s that a few flutterings of references to the AIDS crisis began to pop up. And even then, many of the artists who first used their art to broach the delicate topic were obscure pop bands or directors of fringe movies."