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Will Trump's Return Coincide With the Death of Progressive Media?
We all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information. If we fail to do so, America’s media landscape may soon mirror those of the autocratic nations the incoming president so admires.
Nov 24, 2024
Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.
And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.
In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.
The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:
“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”
Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”
Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.
My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.
That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.
As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.
Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.
Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.
As the headline on Fox Business notes:
“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”
Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.
While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”
This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.
While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.
Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.
Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.
There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.
The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).
In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.
Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.
As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:
“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.
“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”
All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.
A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.
Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.
I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.
In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.
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US Fascism Has Arrived Thanks to 30 Years of Right-Wing Talk Radio Dominance
The GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable, but Democrats must get into the talk-radio game before ever more damage is done.
Sep 28, 2024
“Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison
After Ronald Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule, Republican money men got the memo. Whichever party controlled the most states would have a big edge in both the Senate (and thus control of the Supreme Court nominations) and the Electoral College, and most of the low- and medium-population states had relatively inexpensive media markets.
You could buy or lease radio stations for less than a party might spend over a four-year electoral cycle on advertising, so why not simply acquire a few hundred stations across a dozen or more states and program them with rightwing talk radio 24/7?
This became particularly easy after Bill Clinton signed the neoliberal Telecommunications Act of 1996 that ended limits on how many radio or TV stations a single corporation or billionaire could own. Within months of that bill passing into law, Clear Channel and other networks had gone from small regional groups to massive nationwide radio empires.The strategy worked, and today there are over 1,500 rightwing radio stations in America, along with another 700 or so religious stations that regularly endorse Republican memes and candidates for office.
I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades. In 1994, when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives, he understood the power of talk radio.
“For the first 100 days of the congressional session,” writes Randy Bobbit in his book Us Against Them, “talk radio hosts broadcast live from the capitol building…. When the talk radio throng outgrew the working spaces available, Gingrich allowed some hosts to work in the extra space in his office.”
George W. Bush repeatedly invited talk-radio hosts to broadcast from the White House lawn, although Obama cancelled the tradition; Trump then continued the Republican seduction of the media that dated back to the 1990s.
And the GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable.
A few years ago, a billionaire acquired one of the largest networks of these stations (800+ stations) and a senator I’ve known for years invited him and me to meet in his office near the US Capitol. The Senator asked the billionaire — who then owned several hundred stations programming exclusively rightwing content — if he’d ever considered putting some progressive content on the air.
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades.
The billionaire leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, tented his fingers in front of his mouth, and then said, carefully but emphatically:
“I’ll never put anybody on my air who wants to raise my taxes.”
A few years earlier, I’d sat at lunch at a Talkers Magazine conference with a vice president of what is arguably the most influential of the rightwing radio station networks; the company had started out as a bible publishing business and moved from there into radio and then into political radio.
I asked him if he’d consider putting a progressive show on any of his stations (they were all 100% conservative talk) and he bluntly told me it was “never going to happen” because, he said, “It’s impossible for a liberal to be a true Christian.”
Along with Fox “News,” rightwing talk radio is the main way Republicans have seized and held control over multiple red states. History shows that putting progressive programming on the air in those states could reverse that trend.
Back in 2008, Air America was broadcasting on 62 radio stations that covered a large part of America, including rural areas that had never before experienced progressive talk radio. Most of the stations were leased from Clear Channel, which also owned and programmed rightwing radio on several hundred of its stations.
I’m not aware of any studies proving or disproving the hypothesis, but I believe a large factor in President Obama’s election in 2008 was Air America promoting his candidacy relentlessly. It certainly didn’t hurt: we reached millions of people every single day during that election.
Liberal talk radio carried important messages that were vital to the rural parts of America. That we are all interdependent; that none of us can entirely stand alone unless we are fabulously rich, which is the sales pitch the billionaires try to sell us with their libertarianism; that without government supports and a social safety net, farming would be so vulnerable and financially dangerous (particularly with our weather emergency) that it wouldn’t be viable.
Think about it — political campaigns will pay thousands for a minute of advertising, and find that to be so effective that they continue to buy ads year after year. If that minute can be so influential, how about a host — who’s built a relationship with his or her listeners — telling them dozens of times a day who they should vote for and why? You literally can’t buy promotion like that; you have to buy the station instead.
I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.
Sheldon and Anita Drobney, two venture capitalists from Chicago, read the article and called me up; the next thing I knew I was in the Midwest helping them and Jon Sinton game out how to bring a progressive network into being. Sheldon wrote about it in his book, The Road to Air America, including reprinting my original article.
Impatient to prove the concept of progressive talk radio could work, I started my own program on a local Vermont station in March, 2003, and then moved it to a radio network in 2004. When Air America came online in 2005, we moved it to that network and picked up SiriusXM.
Then Mitt Romney decided he was going to run for president. No slouch, Mr. Romney: he understood the power of media and so apparently directed his private equity firm, Bain Capital, to purchase the entire portfolio of Clear Channel radio stations in the summer of 2008.
Within two years, heading toward the 2012 election when Romney challenged Obama, most all of their stations had flipped their programming from Air America to sports. It killed Air America, although my show was the lone survivor and is still on SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and stations across the country.
Around the time Romney was buying Clear Channel, a group of Air America talent and I met in DC with a group of Democratic members of the House and Senate. We suggested they should reach out to big Democratic donors and encourage them to buy stations, so if Clear Channel ever pulled the plug on our leases we’d still be on the air.
We argued that, just as Republicans have discovered, it would be a lot cheaper than spending billions on advertising every two or four years.
Initially, the response was positive until one of the senators, who later ran for president, threw cold water on the idea, arguing that the “free market” should determine things like who owns radio stations, rather than a political party or people aligned with it.
Time has passed and word has spread. Entrepreneurs across America have bought or started radio stations — some normal, some “low-power FM” that works just fine in urban areas — to carry progressive programming. It’s a growing trend, and there are even rumors that George Soros is investing in the business.
I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for the Grassroots Radio Conference this week in New Orleans; progressive radio station owners, operators, programmers, and talent from more than half the American states will be there. This is a big step.
A Pew study found that 16 percent of Americans get their election-year information from talk radio. In rural states, where radio stations are cheap, people are far more likely to drive long distances and listen to local radio than in cities; flipping smaller red states shouldn’t be impossible if progressives could put up a few good stations in each state.
While Democrats spend over a billion dollars on paid advertising every two years, and several billion every four years, Republicans use this model of long-term trusting relationships with radio hosts to get out the vote for the GOP.
They know the truth of the old advertising saying, “Nothing beats word-of-mouth.” And a recent Neilson survey supports that adage when it found that 92 percent of consumers “believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.”
In 2016, right-wing talk radio gave Donald Trump the boost he needed to put him in the White House. The hosts loved him and promoted him relentlessly. The same went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, as talk radio became the primary locus for swift-boating John Kerry.
It works. Every weekday, all across America, people get into their cars and drive to or from work listening to the radio; as the nation’s largest statistics organization, Statista, notes, “During an average week in September 2020, radio reached 90.9 percent of all American men aged between 35 and 64 years of age.”
Radio engages, persuades, and informs — and, when done right, builds trust. And the first rule of politics is that trust wins elections.
In politics, just a few points usually decides winners and losers — and talk radio has reliably delivered that incremental edge to the GOP for three decades.
Democrats must get into the talk-radio game. As the old saying goes, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
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