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How bad is the political imbalance on our radio dial? Check out these stats from a Center for American Progress study: on the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive; and each weekday, there is 2,570 hours of conservative talk compared to just 254 hours of progressive talk—more than ten hours of conservative talk to every one hour of progressive radio.
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from this 2007 report:
The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio
and from today's ny times, a paul krugman piece that simply restates the obvious:
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Fear and Favor
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”
True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.
I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.
Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.
And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.
Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?
Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.
Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.
Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.
As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.
So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?
Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.
Thus in Britain, a reporter at one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers, News of the World, was caught hacking into the voice mail of prominent citizens, including members of the royal family. But Scotland Yard showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the story. Now the editor who ran the paper when the hacking was taking place is chief of communications for the Conservative government — and that government is talking about slashing the budget of the BBC, which competes with the News Corporation.
So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments. After all, if you’re a media mogul, it’s always good to have friends in high places. And the most reliable friends are the ones who know they owe it all to you.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/op...04krugman.html
i think it's long past time that conservative stopped pretending that there is such a thing as a "liberal press" except as a quirk that marks the private language of the right---in material terms on the radio, it is a conservative domain. in the written press, there is a particular, self-referential space of conservative infotainment. on the web, it's like any other special-interest space. if you want to repair a hynudai, there's hyundai places; if you want to think alot about peanut butter, there are people who'll think along with you; if you want conservative infotainment, there's others who are more than willing to provide paste-ups of material from the appropriate sources or "commentary" that's almost (almost) inevitably written in conservo-speak.
the transformation of fox news away from anything that's remotely like a news outlet and into a media interface for conservative political interests has in a sense been so obvious for so long that people i think forget sometimes to pay it adequate attention. but now, as krugman points out (following on politico, which published a short piece about this last week) fox news is (a) responsible for the spread of the tea party movement and (b) an employer of almost all major conservative political candidates.
there's something wrong about that.
what do you think should be done?
personally, i think that a re-imposition of the fairness doctrine would be a good first step, a reminder that broadcast (and it's digital correlate) is a public act and comes with responsibilities for accuracy and impartiality--not "objectivity" but impartiality.
and i would like to see from there fox news shut down as a "news" operation.
i wouldn't care if fox continued to operate as conservative entertainment, but it should not be allowed the category news.
beneath the, however, is maybe a more fundamental issue: is it the case that private ownership should run rough-shod over all other considerations with a media outlet?
is it the case that rupert murdoch's hard-right politics are necessarily ok as a framework for processing infotainment simply because he owns the network?
what about the public that's served?
doesn't that come with a responsibility beyond the sale of advertising?
i expect that conservatives will be all milty freidmany and argue that there's no obligation to anyone except shareholders and that all ethical questions are settled by shareholders making a profit.
but i maintain a perhaps naive idea that if self-governance is to mean anything, people need accurate, reliable information because they need to be in a position to make actual decisions.
of course, i'm painfully aware of what a charade american democracy is in these total-domination-by-a-financial-oligarchy days of decline.
but what do you think?
should this have been allowed in the first place?
how is this not cultural domination exercised by people whose sole qualification is that they've got the money to produce programming?
who owns the airwaves?
what is news?