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fairness doctrine
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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Reich is Wrong: Fascism Not Against Laissez-Faire
Racism and xenophobia fanned by GOP propaganda are what have brought us to the brink.
May 21, 2024
Robert Reich is one of the good guys in public life. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Reich was a consistent advocate for the average worker. When he left office, he refrained from cashing in as so many of his contemporaries, like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, did.
Instead, he did what former public servants should be doing: educating the public about the government’s policies, and what they mean to society. His mission was and is to define the meaning of the economic policies that began around 1980: financialization, deindustrialization, non-enforcement of antitrust law, union-busting, and tax cuts for the rich, policies that were to some extent exacerbated in the administration he served.
In a recent video, Reich attempted to answer the largest and most existential question in the country today: Why are so many Americans attracted to fascism? He more or less takes for granted the premise that the Republican Party under Donald Trump is fascism, and I would be the last person to dispute this. Eight years ago, I foresaw that Trump’s GOP had the makings of an authoritarian cult, with the Trump rallies of 2016 already being an American adaptation of what went on at Nuremberg in the 1930s.
The powers-that-be... are very adept at creating a funhouse-mirror distortion of reality to obscure the most bedrock issue of any society: Who gets what, and who pays the price.
Arguably, the financialization of the economy and its attendant effects—creating wealth beyond counting while spawning ruination in cities like Detroit or Youngstown, and producing over 800 American billionaires even as it generated rising income inequality—was the greatest paradigm shift in the postwar history of the United States. Reich’s hypothesis that the economic engineering begun by the Reagan administration caused working people to be attracted to fascism is neat and plausible. It is to some degree conventional wisdom: Shortly after Trump’s election, the establishment media informed us that “economic anxiety” among working people secured his victory.
Unfortunately, an explanation can be neat and plausible, and still be wrong.
Exit polling data from 2016 showed that Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year and by nine points among those making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump, on the other hand, won every demographic making $50,000 or more. Other data indicated that the average Trump voter had a median household income of $72,000—well above the then-median household income of all Americans at $56,000.
Eventually, the media began backing away from the economic anxiety theory, albeit in mealy-mouthed fashion. The New York Times proposed a different reason from Trump’s electoral success: "status anxiety" (a euphemism for fear of minorities). Another was "racial resentment" (although how this term is functionally different from garden-variety racism is not clarified).
But economic anxiety as a rationale is still widely circulated, despite the fact that the data from 2016 were broadly confirmed by the 2020 election. In that contest, Joe Biden won voters making less than $50,000 a year and those making between $50,000 and $100,000, losing only the demographic above $100,000. Perhaps those in the hundred k and up category feel economic anxiety—hey, dealers aren’t giving away BMWs!—but why didn’t poorer demographics feel that anxiety acutely enough to give a majority to Trump?
This is not to say that Reich’s thesis is wholly wrong; the last 40 years of economic policy has to have had broad social effects. But there must have been additional factors in play. The Washington Post has cited the wealth or lack of wealth in regions, rather than in individual voters, as being more determinant of voting patterns; poor counties skew towards Trump, but so do wealthy communities.
What could drive such disparate demographics to support Trump? Already in 2017, two analysts were not in doubt: “We find that Republicans have significantly lower levels of economic anxiety compared to Democrats and Independents, and that there is no significant difference in economic peril between Clinton and Trump voters.” If the economic factor can be discounted, then what happened? “Our analysis shows Trump accelerated a realignment in the electorate around racism, across several different measures of racial animus—and that it helped him win.”
That is a better explanation as to why Elliott County, Kentucky, one of the poorest in the country, and Suffolk County, New York, one of the richest, could vote the same way in 2016. Racism is a throughline in American history since the 17th century. It was responsible for an entire region’s socio-economic system and triggered the bloodiest war in our history; in the 20th century, many state governments were de facto controlled by the Ku Klux Klan.
Economists both left and right fall prey to an exaggerated belief that economics is at the bottom of human motivation and determines history in a predictable fashion. While not denying that at some level the economic foundation of a society has far-reaching implications for its development, we should recognize the limits of economic reductionism for something as complex as the motivations of voters. It matters, because if economic anxiety is not the root cause of an attraction to fascism, then improving economic conditions (as Biden is trying to accomplish with the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act) does not solve the problem.
There are motivational triggers besides economics in play: The culture war that began as a backlash to the protests over Vietnam and the urban riots has only grown more intense, and in several elections has overshadowed economic issues. Like a black hole, the culture war has sucked into its gravity well public policy issues that should be discussed on their own merits, like abortion, firearms safety, border security, and school curricula, and transmuted them into hyper-partisan symbols of tribal politics.
In an imitation of economics, political science has traditionally used the “rational choice” model to explain voting patterns: People vote for their own rational interest. But ever since repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (another little-analyzed policy of the Reagan administration), the Republican Party has built up a comprehensive and immersive propaganda system that allows its followers to pretend they are receiving actual news, and (this is the really sinister part) conditions them to distrust any other sources of information about politics, society, and current events.
As author Jen Senko documents in The Brainwashing of My Dad, the conservative media-entertainment complex can turn a person against his own family. Under the circumstances, how can we expect people exposed to this sort of propaganda conditioning to vote for their economic interests when Fox News drums into their heads that labor unions are the spawn of the devil?
According to the narrative, Joe didn’t get laid off laid off or fail to get promoted because the hedge fund that owns the company he works for wanted to cut costs to allow a share buyback; he lost out because of cheap immigrant labor or a Black got promoted instead. The GOP (and not just Trump) has been pushing the scapegoating of others for the negative fallout of its own economic policies for decades, and it has been remarkably successful.
What else would account for a disabled coal miner who finally got signed up for Obamacare (and was glad to get it), voting for a Republican candidate, Matt Bevins, who explicitly promised to dismantle Obamacare insurance pools if he were elected governor of Kentucky? You’ve probably guessed already: because Bevins was a businessman who would create jobs.
While Karl Marx was the most notorious practitioner of economic reductionism as mentioned earlier, he also coined a term that rings truer now than ever. Why don’t people or economic classes accurately see and assess their own interests? Mystification was his answer. The powers-that-be, then as now, are very adept at creating a funhouse-mirror distortion of reality to obscure the most bedrock issue of any society: Who gets what, and who pays the price.
Reich mentions the anger that Trump supporters feel toward “elites.” It is here that mystification plays its intended role. The selfish, conniving, conspiratorial elites as presented by Fox News are not Harlan Crow, Charles Koch, the Mercer family, and certainly not Rupert Murdoch or Trump himself. The elites have been magically transformed into schoolteachers, librarians, public servants, and university instructors (I say “instructors” rather than “professors” because a tenured, well-paid professoriate is almost extinct, replaced with grad students and adjuncts making McDonald’s wages).
As in the 1930s, contemporary fascism is nothing more than a swindle designed to divert people from real problems by giving them imaginary demons to wrestle with. The cultish leader-worship that Reich mentions with regard to the adulation of Trump is a significant part of the phenomenon, but it serves the larger interest of diversion from the real issues.
Trump is a very skilled demagogue, but the stage, props, and microphone—not to mention the audience—were already in place, put there by four decades of careful preparation by the Republican Party. Every platform, pronouncement, and meme that the GOP has devised in that time period has been calculated to prevent ordinary people from looking too closely at property relations in this country, and instead blame people more likely to be found near the bottom of society than at its top. It has largely succeeded in that goal.
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Newton Minow, Ex-FCC Chair Who Said TV a 'Vast Wasteland' Dead at 97
"After all, the airways belong to the people."
May 06, 2023
Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chair in the early 1960s famously proclaimed that network television was a “vast wasteland,” died at home in Chicago Saturday. He was 97.
Minow was appointed as FCC chair by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Minow received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
In his first public address as FCC chairman, on May 9, 1961, at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Washington he said:
“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better,” he said. “But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. ... I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland."
“You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.”
Minow called for “a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives” and said, “There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license”
“My faith is in the belief that this country needs and can support many voices of television — and that the more voices we hear, the better, the richer, the freer we shall be. After all, the airways belong to the people.”
“In 1961, I worried that my children would not benefit much from television. But in 1991 I worry that my grandchildren will actually be harmed by it,” he said in a 1991 Associated Press interview.
Television is one of our century’s most important advances “and yet, as a nation, we pay no attention to it,” Minow said.
\u201cNewton Minow, who as President John F. Kennedy\u2019s new FCC chairman in 1961 sent shock waves through the country by calling American television \u201ca vast wasteland,\u201d died on Saturday. He was 97. https://t.co/cVFLWue78N\u201d— The New York Times (@The New York Times) 1683404105
Open Mind: Vast Common GoodPBS and FCC Chairman Emeritus Newton Minow recounts the history of public television's origins and charts our path from a ...
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