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idea that somehow deficits are good, taxpayer-funded photo-ops are wonderful, and insider politicians profiting from their knowledge and access are no longer worth mentioning. (All things Clinton was savaged and/or investigated for.)
Many industry watchers were dumbfounded at the overt bias and political boosterism. Even BBC Director General Greg Dyke weighed in, saying, "I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war." Across America and around the world, savvy media watchers wondered out loud why our giant networks and media companies would suddenly become so overtly partisan, loudly and unquestioningly kissing up to the Bush administration? And why did they ignore a multi-million-dollar audience of tens of millions of Democratic/liberal listeners - people with upscale demographics who advertisers would love to reach?
On my radio show a few weeks ago, I suggested the answer was simple - it was all about June 2nd.
That's the Cinderella date for the giants of the media business, the day when Republican activist and FCC Chairman Michael Powell will announce whether or not the FCC will allow further mergers in the media business - mergers that will help wipe out the few remaining small, local radio/TV stations and newspapers, and, most significantly, make literally billions of dollars in profits for the industry's giants.
This is all about paying forward, I said. The industry giants are ignoring markets and passing up profits over the short term in order to make bigger money over the long term. It's not politics - it's just good business. If Gore had been in office and his FCC chairman was inclined to approve further industry mergers, Gore would have suddenly found himself equally bulletproof in the media, much to his delight. At least until the mergers were approved.
Nobody in the industry was willing to publicly agree with me, but nobody denied it, either.
Now, it appears I was right, but the other shoe was dropped two weeks early in Manhattan, a block from Ground Zero.
Last week, Michael Powell announced that he was refusing to postpone the FCC vote on deregulation, and that he was personally in favor of loosening the ownership rules, making the outcome a slam-dunk. In giving the big media companies advance notice that they'd get what they want, Powell also unwittingly began the process of cutting off Republicans from an exclusive lock on hundreds of millions of dollars a year in free political advertising provided by the constant national drumbeat of right-wing talk hosts. Thus, Karl Rove's nightmare.
Now that they're past their concerns about how this administration will decide the media consolidation issue, the media giants are now breathing a bit easier, and getting back to the business of making money.
The demands of the huge unserved market of Gore voters and progressives is real, and internet empires are being built on it. For example, www.radiopower.org just last week announced they'd surpassed the 1.5 million-user mark for their progressive talk radio webstream. The webstream of www.ieamericaradio.com regularly maxxes out with numbers that make terrestrial stations catch their breath, as well as successfully syndicating their programming on terrestrial radio stations across the United States. The strongly left-leaning Democracy Now radio show has exploded in listenership, and the new liberal talk star Nancy Skinner has gone from zero to 14 stations in fewer than three weeks, syndicated by both i.e. America and Doug Stephan's network. Peter Werbe and Mike Malloy from i.e. America Radio Network are doing great, even picked up by Sirius, and Michael Horn, CEO/President of Cable Radio Network CRN Radio News (syndicated on cable systems nationwide), announced at the Talkers conference this weekend that he, too, was looking for good liberal talk show hosts.
Although the right-wingers love to claim that they simply balance NPR (the claim was raised again at the Talkers event), it's an argument that commercial programmers know is specious. NPR never has and never will run hour after hour of a single commentator ranting about the wonders of one party and the horrors of another. Centrist and left-wing talk radio is still an emerging product with a huge unserved market.
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