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rush limbaugh
Right-Wing Control of Media Has Crushed the Promise of US Democracy
If progressives want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
Jan 15, 2025
Republicans are using their massive structural media and social media advantage to try to destroy Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.
It follows an old script, that’s recently been played out in Russia and Hungary, among other nations: Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.
Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.
Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.
The plan for this wasn’t a secret; it was laid out in a 1971 memo by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972 where he could participate in putting the plan into action — as he did with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (Powell wrote the latter) legalizing political bribery by saying “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”
It began the corruption of the American government by the Reagan administration.
But the details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
First, Republicans realized that public opinion drives everything, so they set out to seize as much control over the instrument that drives public opinion as they could: the media.
The details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
Second, they realized that the Senate was the power-based linchpin for control of the legislative branch and the key to controlling both the Executive and Judicial branches because only the Senate confirms presidential cabinet positions and federal judges.
If they controlled the Senate much of the time and occasionally got a Republican president, they could also easily stack both the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.
To control the Senate, they knew, they had to control a majority of the states. And that came back to controlling public opinion through the media, particularly in low-population or largely rural states where media could be bought or coopted cheaply.
To first influence public opinion, back in the 1970s-1990s era, billionaires associated with the GOP built a whole series of institutions whose sole purpose was to influence public opinion in ways that comported with the billionaire’s oligarchic agenda.
They crank out policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers and websites, engage in social media, and provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, NPR, and podcasts. Another major function is to “educate” and lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.
Those include:
— Cato Institute
— Mercatus Center at George Mason University
— Americans for Prosperity
— Heritage Foundation
— Manhattan Institute
— American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
— DonorsTrust
— Independent Women's Forum (IWF)
— Federalist Society
— Judicial Crisis Network (Now Concord Fund)
— Republican State Leadership Committee
— Alliance Defending Freedom
— Marble Freedom Trust
— 85 Fund (Formerly Judicial Education Project)
They also created the State Policy Network, which funds and guides a network of state-based think tanks in every state in America. They similarly influence political discussion through interactions with the media by publishing papers, participating in social media, and lobbying/educating Republican governors, state representatives, and senators. (At the end of this article is a list of them.)
There is no similar infrastructure on the left because no lefty billionaires ever set out to create one.
There are a few left-leaning think tanks and policy outfits like Public Citizen, NAACP, ACLU, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation. None of these, however, have levels of funding, inter-agency coordination, or integration with the Democratic Party that even begins to approximate the list of conservative organizations above.
In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence public policy, conservatives focused on the media itself, which they had historically seen as their enemy. Early efforts included Lee Atwater’s famous 1980s “work the refs” strategy of complaining loudly whenever media outlets reported on partisan issues that reflected poorly on the GOP and its politicians.
These were followed by funding and rolling out Rush Limbaugh’s show (1988), Reagan fast-tracking the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch and the subsequent start of Fox “News”; Sinclair’s purchase of hundreds of local TV stations; billionaires like the Dickey brothers purchasing hundreds of local radio stations; and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchasing Clear Channel (2008) and then taking progressive Air America programming off their stations (2010).
Multimillionaire televangelists and wealthy rightwing Hispanics got into the game as well over the past two decades, purchasing over a thousand radio stations nationwide.
The result of these collective efforts is around 1500 radio stations programming rightwing talk (and hundreds of young “farm team” rightwing talk show hosts learning the trade in local markets), almost a thousand “nonprofit” religious stations that also push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations (that had a huge influence on the Latino vote in 2024).
Rightwing media is now a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that includes three major cable TV networks, and more recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong picked up the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own around half of all local newspapers in the country.
And now they’re focusing this media behemoth toward their efforts to destroy the Democratic Party in California and neuter Governor Newsom’s hopes to one day become president.
Again, there is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
A major parallel strategy Republicans followed was to use this media monster to take over enough states to take control of the Senate and, even when not in majority control, use the filibuster to block Democratic efforts at reform.
There is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
Their initial focus was low-population and largely rural states, as radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in those markets are often very cheap.
By the end of 2010, when Romney/Bain shut down the progressive Air America radio network that had helped get Barack Obama elected in 2008, one could drive from coast-to-coast and continuously hear rightwing talk radio but only rarely (when passing through big cities or on SiriusXM) find a progressive voice.
This silencing of progressive talk radio and absolute dominance of the airwaves, both on radio and TV, made it easy for Republicans over the past 35 years to flip low-population and rural states that had been Democratic for generations into the GOP’s camp.
West Virginia, Arkansas (former governor: Bill Clinton), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Montana (former governor: Brian Schweitzer), Iowa (former governor: Tom Vilsack), Wyoming (former governor: Mike Sullivan), Tennessee (former senator: Al Gore), Georgia (former governor: Roy Barnes), Missouri, and Texas (former governor: Ann Richards) all went from solid blue or largely blue to solid red, as there have functionally been no dissenting voices heard in local media since the 1980s.
A large handful of other states followed a similar trajectory, giving Republicans majority control of the least democratic of our legislative institutions, the Senate, where Wyoming (pop: 584,000) has the same two senators — and thus the same legislative power — as California (pop: 38.9 million).
Following these victories, Republicans turned their attention to the fastest growing aspects of the Fourth Estate: Social media and podcasts. With help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talk hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages condemning Democrats for every little thing that went wrong in America.
Most recently, they’ve brought control of X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under their banner, both through allowing the uninhibited spread of political lies and disinformation and by tilting their secret algorithms that control what content people see toward the right.
As a result, Republicans — using their vast think tank and media power — have succeeded in rolling back voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and taking an axe to public education. And now they’re using lies and slander to go after Gavin Newsom.
This massive machine was so successful in recasting the public perception of elected Democrats that millions of dispirited formerly-Democratic voters simply gave up and failed to vote in the 2024 election.
Next in their sights — along with more tax cuts for the billionaires who funded all this — are healthcare and Social Security, as they work to roll back the last 100 years and end the New Deal and Great Society.
If Democrats want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
The coming election of a new DNC chair presents an opportunity to begin reforming and redirecting the efforts of the Party to a 50-state strategy that can effectively compete with Republicans.
And billionaires with a social conscience — like MacKenzie Scott, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Tom Steyer — need to consider emulating the efforts of Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and Ken Griffin.
Republicans have already decided to exploit the climate-change-driven wildfires on the west coast to try to flip California from Blue to Red in the next elections. They’re using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.
Without an all-hands-on-deck effort to build out a Democratic media machine now, our precious democracy may soon be replaced with an authoritarian dystopia that serves nobody but the morbidly rich.
And California could become their biggest victory since the election of Governor Reagan.
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The Energy Gap: Why Democrats Keep Losing to GOP Plutocrats
Energy counts, matters, and wins the political battles. There isn't even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
Nov 29, 2024
Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article “Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?” He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all.
In 2001, long after the 1980 Reagan landslide of Jimmy Carter, Labor Secretary under Clinton, Robert Reich, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post which declared, “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.”
In the following years, while the Democrats were accelerating their abandonment of half the country as “red states,” and became more out of touch with blue-collar workers and unions, whom they took for granted, the Republicans were becoming more energized by the year. Their mouthpieces dominating talk radio – e.g., Rush Limbaugh – were directly sowing unrebutted discord, day after day, among blue-collar workers against the Democrats. Why? It’s because the Democrats essentially gave up on Talk Radio and didn’t bother listening to how these corporatist radio bloviators were turning hard working listeners into Reagan Democrats.
While the GOP was eroding the core base of the Democratic Party and taking total control of red state legislatures, governorships, and courts, the Democrats, starting in 1979, were plunging into enticing and taking corporate PAC money, as urged by then Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA). This reliance on corporate campaign money weakened the Party’s positions and actions on behalf of workers, consumers, the environment, and the need for an expanded social safety net for the populace. Western nations have provided their citizens superior health care, family support and education programs for decades.
The comparative energy levels were exhibited in the 2010 state gerrymandering drive. While the Democrats were snoozing, a laser beam effort in several states, like Pennsylvania, took the Dems to the cleaners. The result: majority GOP Congressional delegations for a decade even though the Democrats won the popular vote there. (See: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley.)
"The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers."
Recall, in 2009 Obama had a large majority Democratic advantage in the House and Senate as a result of his win over John McCain in November 2008. Instead of going forward full throttle with this mandate, Obama chose extreme caution. He focused on Obamacare, after giving up right at the beginning the crucial “public option” allowing people to opt out of the corporate health insurance grip. He gave it up unilaterally before negotiations began with the obstructive GOP.
For the rest of his term, Obama appeared to be resting. He promised a $9.50 federal minimum wage in his 2008 campaign but didn’t lift a finger for it during his first term. It is still at a poverty wage of $7.25 per hour to this day. He didn’t really put up a grassroots fight for his stimulus bill following the Wall Street collapse and the great recession starting under George W. Bush, (the war criminal against the Iraqi people.) Obama even declined to prosecute the Wall Street crooks.
In the meantime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, managed to lose the House to a reactionary GOP in the 2010 elections, the 2012 elections, the 2014 elections and the 2016 elections, straightjacketing any possible Obama agenda in the Congress. The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers while the GOP had a corporatist anti-worker, consumer, and women’s agenda and with ferocious energy blocked improvements supported by a majority of people in the US.
Even more inexplicable was the Democratic Party’s refusal to strongly support the galvanizing political civic movement to cancel the Electoral College (see NationalPopularVote.com). This organizing effort has led so far to the passage of state laws (California, New York, Illinois, etc.) handing the Electoral College vote to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton) but lost the Electoral College vote to G.W. Bush and the surprised Donald Trump. Still, the Democrats stay on the sidelines though this movement already has enabled state laws totaling 215 Electoral College votes, needing only to get to 270 to neutralize this anti-democratic vestige from the historic era of slavery.
Almost everywhere you look you see this huge disparity in energy levels. Compare the smaller Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives with the Pelosi-toady Progressive Caucus. The difference is that between thunder and slumber over the years.
Compare the Tea Party’s slamming impact on the established GOP in Congress with the tepid attitude of most labor unions and the AFL-CIO deferring to the Democratic Party.
Compare the over-the-top corporate judges to the so-called liberal judges, as relating to federal cases against Trump.
Compare the comprehensive ghastly Heritage Foundation’s 900-page 2025 blueprint directed toward the GOP expansion of the corporate state and the stripping away of services to the people and their rights with the agenda advanced by the progressive citizen groups. No comparison. The media notices this difference in energy levels which is one reason it gives more coverage to the right-wing messianic bulldozers who show in every way that they are hungrier for taking power as they take no prisoners.
Partisan energy disparities even extend to the right-wing vs. left-wing media. The former has the brazen Fox News network. The left has nothing like that. Bill Moyers told me he urged mega-rich George Soros and allies to start a competing progressive network after Fox became quickly formidable. No way.
The right-wing magazines cover the actions of their right-wing allies, plus those gatherings and books. While the progressive media mostly ignores reviewing progressive books and what citizen groups are driving for against corporate power in Washington, DC, and at the state level. The Progressive media prefers publishing their opinions and exposé pieces. That’s one reason why there are more non-fiction right-wing corporatist books which become best sellers, while progressive tomes gather dust.
Further weakening the energy gap in favor of the GOP are the Democrats who look for scapegoats like the Greens to account for their disgraceful losses. They rarely look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats like Norman Solomon (See, Roots Action) issue “autopsy reports” following Party defeats. The 2017 report documented the Democratic Party’s arrogant, entrenched leadership which ignores the progressive base.
After the November 5th debacle, have you heard about mass resignations by Democrats responsible for this victory by the convicted felon, chronic liar, bigot, corrupt, phony promisor Trump? Well, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison is resigning but that is pro forma. Other Democratic leaders are still on board at the state and federal level, in addition to, astonishingly enough, the failed corporate political/media consultants who enriched themselves while wasting away the biggest flood of campaign money in American history on the Kamala Harris campaign.
Younger Democrats who raise the need to displace the failed Democratic apparatchiks, and who want popular vigorous progressive agendas, as espoused by the naturally popular Senator Bernie Sanders, get ignored or worse pushed out of contention, visibility and, importantly, respect.
The Party’s losing elders have assured the absence of farm teams, of successors. Speaker Pelosi and her deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer are experts at this geriatric supremacy despite their track record of losing to the aggressive Republican plutocrats. Energy counts, matters and wins the political battles. There isn’t even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
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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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