Is this the genesis - or denouement - of progressive media?
Progressives need a sugar daddy.
In 2019, I wrote the following in a piece titled, “Here We Go Again: The Corporate Media Is Ready To Repeat 2016:
The corporate media is in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump.
No matter how many times he attacks with claims of “fake news,” and calls journalists the “enemy of the people;” no matter how worked up networks get over how he treats them; no matter how many times it appears as though they are finally gaining the courage to stand up to their abuser, the mainstream networks just can’t get seem to muster up the courage to quit him.
Have they not learned anything from 2016?
It’s been nearly six years and two presidential elections since then.
Sadly, nothing has changed.
Now that the convicted felon is making a comeback to the Oval Office, the mediasphere is all abuzz asking “What happened?” and there are no shortages of postmortems of the Democratic party and Vice President Harris’ campaign.
While there is certainly blame enough to go around, the for-profit corporate ratings-driven media has consistently failed to do its job of calling out mis- and dis-information (aka lies) in favor of political personality horse races.
Its particular offense the past three presidential election cycles was its tendency to, as MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell put it, “sane-wash” the twice-impeached adjudicated rapist’s behavior and rhetoric as if they were normal while fixating on President Joe Biden’s age instead of his historic accomplishments. This allowed the Overton window to swing open so widely, just about anything is dog whistle-free in political campaigns now--racism, sexism, xenophobia, lies, ad hominem attacks, and bluster devoid of any policy.
The right-leaning corporations that own the media are once again going to rake in untold amounts with its cash cow president poised to stand behind the presidential seal — again. Its pandering to the billionaire class has paid off — again.
Will there ever be a truly “liberal” media?
Can we expect, with enough capital and organization, to see a mainstream progressive cable channel akin to Free Speech TV and the plethora of podcasts and Substack pages re-inventing how Americans get their news?
Can we realistically work toward creating a network or series of networks that could compete with such well-funded juggernauts as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and the king of infotainment propaganda, Fox so-called “news”?
Last week Comcast announced it will be selling off USA, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, the Golf Channel, and — drum roll — CNBC and MSNBC, leaving them vulnerable to the next billionaire interested in pushing a particular narrative.
Will it be billionaire Rupert Murdock, looking to solidify the propaganda he has been bankrolling since forming Fox so-called “news” with Roger Ailes in the 1990s? (Fox was forced last year to pay a $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems.)
Will it be billionaire John Malone who took the helm at CNN two years ago with the expressed intent to “push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining.”
Former CNN chairman Chris Licht, in a pathetic attempt to court the right-wing hate media audience, instructed staff to stop referring to Donald Trump’s discredited claim the 2020 election was stolen from him as “the big lie” because it sounds too much like a “Democratic Party talking point.”
Will it be Robert Iger, Disney Chairman and former CEO of ABC?
Paul Verna, principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, explained, “The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business. That’s why Comcast did what it did today.”
Progressive author and talk show host on the SiriusXM Progress channel, Thom Hartmann, who wrote the original business plan for the defunct Air America radio, explained recently:
Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
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 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.
The media is as “liberal” as the corporations that own it, and those corporations thrive on horse race because it’s how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people interested in staying rich (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), their personal fortunes depend on this. This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.
Millionaires and billionaires should not “own” our media.
But since the rollback of the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule under the Reagan administration, and the subsequent death knell, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, news--or something at least called it — has become very profitable.
This means, unfortunately, progressives need a sugar daddy.
The problem is, though, that since most of the wealthiest people have a personal stake in staying as rich as possible while paying next to nothing (and in some cases, actually nothing) in taxes, they naturally gravitate toward the party whose raison d’être lies solely in massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — the republican party.
The media is apparently not interested in fulfilling its responsibility as “the fourth estate”.
What are media personalities going to do the day the new president accomplishes getting libel laws rewritten and starts locking them up, as he has threatened to do? Think their pathetic attempts at appeasement like we saw last week from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and Jeff Bezos in his failure to allow The Washington Post editorial board to endorse a presidential candidate, are going to be considered, or are they just going to look like a sorry, sad bunch of sycophants afraid of mean things being said about them?
As Thom Hartmann wrote four years ago: “Democrats Can’t Win if They Don’t Play”.
While we’re striving for it, below are some of my go-to alternative news sites and podcasts. (And, yes, a few are from MSNBC hosts.)