Planting Liberally

The recent launch of the staunchly pro-business, anti-reality Fox Business Channel serves as yet another reminder that conservatives have too strong a grip on the national media, hampering any change that we may have of real progressive social change. While FBN's first week was marked by technical glitches, low viewership numbers, and poor editorial choices, it's easy to imagine how the channel could soon skew business reporting even further to the right, thereby making it more difficult for progressive voices to sway investors and business owners to be socially responsible. There are a variety of strategies for moving the tone of media discource back to the left, but today I want to focus on one which I think gets far too little attention: creating progressive traditional mass media. Progressives certainly do have some traditional media, including a large number of alternative weekly newspapers throughout the country and a small armada of prominent national magazines. We also have some mass media, by which I mean media whose viewership/readership numbers compare reasonably well with purportedly non-partisan/non-ideological, or obviously conservative national-distribution media of the same format. Unfortunately, almost all of our mass media is in new media: the progressive blogosphere is one of the few mass media institutions whose audience reach competes reasonably well with purportedly non-partisan or conservative political media of comparable format. The lack of progressive traditional mass media is a big problem for both the political effectiveness of our movement, for obvious reasons. Taken as a whole, the traditional mass media still reaches far more people than progressive media, and therefore helps drive political discourse. Politicians gravitate to that incredibly large source of potential votes, and tend to eschew progressive arguments in order to garner traditional mass media coverage. In this kind of environment, it's incredibly difficult to establish progressive electoral and legislative narratives. True, the traditional mass media are slowing losing audience share to newer, more progressive media, but this shift is far too slow. With the average household still watching nearly seven hours of TV per day, it seems likely that traditional mass media will have an outsized influence on our political discourse for at least another decade, and possibly much longer. There are four kinds of traditional media which progressives need to watch carefully, and in which progressives should try to establish a foothold. In order of priority, I think they are: cable news, national newspapers, local newspapers, and talk radio. With one exception, each of these mass media are currently under the influence of an outsized and outspokenly conservative mass media institution: Fox News Channel (cable), the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post (national newspapers), Clear Channel radio network (talk radio). I added local newspapers to the list because there appears to be a concerted effort on the part of conservative businessmen, ranging from Rupert Murdoch to Dean Singleton, to snap up local newspapers and turn them into right-wing rags. This effort is far from complete, but it appears to be the latest thrust in the conservative movement's longstanding effort to control traditional mass media. More on what is being done to address this gap, and what more we need to do, over the flip... The good news is that there are already a few efforts in flight to address the gap in traditional mass media. Democracy Now! is perhaps the best known and oldest progressive TV talk show, and is distrbuted by a small network of independent radio stations (Pacifica Radio). The 2004 elections spurred the creation of the Air America Radio network, and the Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller radio shows (distributed by Jones Radio Network, which isn't expressly progressive like AAR.) More recently, we've seen the creation of progressive TV channels Free Speech TV, Link TV, and The Real News. As far as I know, there is no effort to create a nationally respected newspaper with an emphatically progressive op-ed page, although the News Guild (a division of Communication Workers of America) has expressed interest in newspaper ownership in the past, making a bid to purchase several Knight-Ridder newspapers when they went on the block in late 2005. There was also a tantalizing post on Dailykos by Major Danby about creating a progressive USA Today many months ago, but I haven't seen much follow-up from Major Danby (possibly because, from the look of his diary archive, he spent the next few months fundraising for YearlyKos.) I'll return to the problem of progressive newspaper establishment in a later post. Let's focus more sharply on progressive radio and TV, for now. The bad news is that these nascent efforts are not, for the most part, large enough or integrated enough to drive progressive narratives into the national political discourse. Nor is the problem entirely due to small audience share. Despite the fact that Link TV can be accessed from one in four US households, it doesn't appear to have the same impact on national political discourse as, say, DailyKos or Huffington Post, whose monthly visitorship numbers are 1.8 million and 3.5 million, respectively. There are, I believe, three big steps we need to take in order to address this problem:

• Expand the reach and power of progressive traditional mass media, by creating public campaigns to encourage broadcasters to distribute progressive shows like Democracy Now!. I plan to do a bit more research on this issue, but as far as I can tell, there are many markets which lack a progressive radio or TV show, despite having a rich density of potential progressive audience members. In some of these markets, I'm sure, conservative ownership of broadcast media makes it difficult to distribute these shows, but my guess is that there are a number of progressive-rich media markets where at least one or two non-conservative broadcast channels could become progressive media distributors. That potential creates an opening for a liberal entrepreneur, who could make good money hammering out deals to bring progressive traditional mass media into new markets.
• Insinuate items from the progressive traditional mass media into online conversation. If we want to insinuate progressive traditional mass media into online conversation, perhaps the first and most important step is broad distribution on YouTube. Despite its many idiosynchracies, YouTube is by far and away the most popular channel for distributing online video; YouTube videos regularly make their way into blog posts, Facebook profiles, and so on. While Link TV, The Real News, and Air America all have YouTube channels, it's important to expand adoption of YouTube to include progressive TV shows like Democracy Now!, Ed Schultz, and Stephanie Miller. Progressive traditional mass media institutions should establish presences on YouTube, if they haven't already, and team up with progressive activists to ensure that their shows are regularly excerpted and distributed on YouTube. Progressive bloggers, in turn, should subscribe to these channels and embed videos whenever possible.
• Encourage progressive traditional mass media (especially progressive TV) to cover more issues of interest to progressive new media, especially domestic issue coverage. A quick search over the past few weeks reveals not one single YouTube video about the S-CHIP story from Link TV, The Real News, or Air America. Now, I'm picking on a single issue, but it's fair to say that the lion's share of videos from LinkTV and The Real News have an international focus, while Air America's recent YouTube videos are more focused on domestic politics. There's nothing wrong with international coverage, and we could all use a better understanding of the world around us. But our experience in the progressive blogosphere clearly demonstrates that we simply can't impact domestic politics unless we cover it and comment on it. While it's important for the progressive blogosphere to pay more attention to coverage from progressive traditional mass media, and to embed videos from these sources in blog posts, it's equally important for progressive traditional mass media to harmonize their coverage - in some small way - with the topics covered by the progressive blogosphere.

These are three rather tall orders, for a variety of reasons. Achieving better market penetration for progressive traditional mass media will require a bit of alchemy, and will probably require overcoming some fairly entrenched, conservative interests. Insinuating YouTube videos from progressive traditional mass media into the progressive blogosphere will be a bit like herding cats. And moving the editorial policies of progressive traditional mass media will be incredibly difficult, or will require policy-by-grantmaking, which is both irritating and expensive. Nevertheless, I believe it's possible to make real progress on all of these fronts. We are now at a point where it will be possible, perhaps in the space of a year or two, to establish a beachhead for progressive viewpoints within the traditional mass media landscape. I'll be addressing each of these three efforts in more detail in future blog posts, but in the meantime, I certainly welcome your thoughts and feedback. Drop a line in the comments if you have other ideas about creating progressive traditional mass media with political impact.