Why A Progressive Media Universe?

A couple of weeks ago, I did a Wall Street Journal Radio interview about our new smartphone app, Progressive Voices. I explained the importance of  a progressive media aggregator that puts written, aural and video content in one place online, since the right wing media outlets like Fox News Channel and Talk Radio dominate their platforms. This isn’t a treatise  about their fantasy of an overwhelmingly liberal media. I think the concept has been fairly thoroughly debunked everywhere from a simple format analysis of broadcast outlets, to the rigorous academic work presented by Eric Alterman in his 2004 book,  “What Liberal Media?” Still, the masters of the Right Wing media machine, led by Fox News Chairman, Roger Ailes, have done, and continue to do, a great propaganda job on the subject. They want our pity. They want us to know that they, the majority, Christian, white, wealthy males who run the media establishment, are victims of terrible media bias. (Victims? Seriously?!) But they have good messaging, consistency, and incredibly good message-discipline, so their complaint isn’t ever far from their lips, and it is always uttered in the same precise way because they understand the human brain. repetition equals credibility.

An early question was, why does the world need another politically ideological media silo? Isn’t it just that kind of divisiveness that sets us against one another? I’ve gotten this question a lot since we started Air America Radio in 2004.

First, as always, I said that I wish it weren’t necessary, but it is. We cannot let lies told so convincingly, and told so often across so many platforms, to so many people, go unchallenged.

Second, in today’s post-mass media world, there are no more hit records we can all sing; no more hit TV shows we all watch; and, no more news broadcasts we all see. For better and worse, public opinion is no longer shaped by a shared media experience. There’s no Walter Cronkite reaching tens of millions of Americans every night. Now there are many outlets on many platforms and the Right has a lock on the two biggest.

There are great journalists working at the broadcast television networks, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and many more newspapers and magazines. These journalists are truth seekers and are not attached to the outcome of their work. If one reads a few different papers every day, hears credible news radio, and watches a little national broadcast network news (don’t get me started on the culture of chalk outlines and house fires on local TV news), one can get a fair view of the happenings in our world. But, the reality is most people haven’t got the time or inclination to sample a number of sources. They find a comfort zone; a place that reinforces their world view, and that’s all they watch. People tend to cocoon in a comfortable media silo.

As a result, there isn’t much unbiased journalism consumed by average Americans. Certainly, there is more opinion masquerading as fact in the 24/7 cable “news” world than is good for our culture. It’s really profitable (Fox News Channel will throw off north of $800 million this year–that’s a fifth of parent News Corp’s profit), and it drives a political agenda. Money and power are not strangers. They usually appear together, like peanut butter and jelly, or Penn and Teller.

And the folks who work for Fox news, as well as the big radio talkers, have so cowed the mainstream (“lamestream,” thanks, Sarah) media that they have lost a lot of the courage that made them great, once upon a time. “False equivalence” is a term we hear more and more. It refers to the cowardly way many news organizations now reduce their exposure to criticism from Fox and Limbaugh. When reporting on the Holocaust, why is it necessary to give a Holocaust denier equal time and status? It’s a false equivalence and you will not find it in any journalism textbooks. It is pure CYA. Despite objective economic studies to the contrary, polls show Americans think the 2009 stimulus didn’t work, thanks largely to Conservative Talk Radio and Fox News. We might hope that the mainstream media would fill the breach and effectively tell the real story, but because they’re intimidated by the right, they give a U. S. Chamber of Commerce propagandist a chance to obscure the truth with unchallenged lies and suppositions. Ah, mainstreamers, we liked it better when you were all about telling the truth, not providing a platform for prevarication.

Rachel Maddow and Frank Rich (and I) will tell you that we think the Left tries to tell the truth more than it tries to shave, shape and persuade. We try not to game the system or use tricks to fool or persuade. Meanwhile, the Right is conniving. It has slogans intended to re-chalk the field: “Fair and Balanced” is a masterpiece of cynical marketing. It was originated to reposition a nonpartisan journalistic entity, CNN, as left wing, thereby conferring centrist status on Fox. “We report, you decide” is a subtle enlistment of the viewer. It says. “We’re not trying to persuade, we’re just presenting facts and letting you arrive at the truth.” It’s marketing gone mad. You have to tip your hat to that kind of demonic brilliance.

If you have only one news source, you are likely under-informed, misinformed, or uninformed. If it’s Fox News, you’re all three.

Recently, on Neal Boortz’s syndicated radio show I learned that there have been race riots and black on white wilding in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and Chicago that the mainstream media refuses to cover (the story was on ABC World News Tonight the next evening). After detailing how black flash mobs had accosted only whites in those three cities, Mr. Boortz went on to helpfully explain that it is happening because Barack Obama constantly fans the flames of class warfare. Then, Mr. Boortz went on to explain, (again, so helpful), that the president has purposely killed the economy so he can more effectively redistribute the wealth (what?!?). The only media outlets I could find that support Mr. Boortz’s theory are StormFront, a neo-Nazi site, and TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s oracle of truth and rational thought.

So, I answer the question by saying that in this climate, even though it runs the risk of further division, there has to be a Progressive Media Universe to balance what Progressive Talk Radio host Stephanie Miller so aptly calls “Right Wing World.” They own the television and the radio. We can’t let them own the emerging Mobile Internet too.

Progressive Media Marches On

Almost nine years ago, my once and future business partner, the effervescent (that is certainly the nicest thing anyone, his dear departed mother included, has ever called him) talk show host, Mike Malloy, called to inform me of two things. One, in spite of his surprisingly high ratings, he had just been fired from WLS, the 50,000 watt, clear-channel ABC owned and operated AM radio station in Chicago, and two, I was about to get a call from some well-heeled listeners who wanted to put him on the air nationally.

I was naturally disappointed that despite our best efforts–getting him the Chicago gig was not easy, and he and his producer/wife, Kathy, had worked really hard to carve a successful liberal niche on a right wing outpost–it had all come crashing down. The general manager couldn’t stand the heat, or Mike, for that matter. Malloy stood out like an erection at a sorority party. Daytime listeners to Rush and Hannity hated Malloy even more than his boss did. Nighttime listeners kept the station under siege during business hours, for they had a righteous hatred of the right-wingers.

This, by the way, was not my first brush with ABC. A few years before Malloy took the wild Chicago ride, I had gotten a national berth for former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Jim Hightower, a kind of latter day Will Rogers. I used up a bunch of favors to get Hightower Radio on the ABC Radio Networks, never a bastion of liberal thought. Hightower, who has famously observed that the washing machine’s agitator is what gets the dirt out, did what he does: he agitated. I have to laugh when I hear about the “liberal media.” Having consulted all the alphabet media companies at one time or another, it is my experience that they are all quite conservative. Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Co. board, we were told, did not find Hightower’s public criticisms of them entertaining in the least. I was instructed to have him keep his head down. I reminded them whom they were talking about. The likelihood of Hightower toeing anybody’s line was pretty slim. We were fired in fairly short order. Malloy made liberal talk 0-2 at ABC.

When the supposedly monied-left called from Chicago, I patiently explained that the reason Malloy didn’t work out for WLS was the same reason he wouldn’t get any traction in a national syndication scenario. They were persistent, and at their behest, I flew to Chicago to discuss the idea further.

It was there that I met another guy they had invited, a fellow from Vermont named Thom Hartmann. To digress ever so briefly, it must be said that Thom is an intellectual tour de force. Everyone who knows him agrees that he is preternaturally smart and uncannily well informed on what can only be described as a too-wide variety of subjects. In addition to having owned a travel agency in Atlanta years ago, Thom and his wife, Louise, have started two schools for educationally challenged kids. Thom wrote, among his sixteen books to date, the first authoritative book on attention deficit disorder. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Shadyac have made movies based on Hartmann books. As I said, the smartest guy in the room. Always.

Meanwhile back in Highland Park, our hosts, Shelley and Anita Drobny, have Thom and me talking about syndicating Malloy nationally. I say I think it will be difficult to sell syndicators and stations on a liberal talk host. The national companies were making a bundle on right wing talk, so you would think they’d jump at a chance to placate the left with their very own shows. For a multitude of excuses that boil down to broadcasters’ fear and a rather disturbing lack of imagination, you’d be wrong. I said there was no way short of buying up a few hundred million of dollars worth of stations to get Malloy on the national radio. Hartmann explained that it was like Classical stations not playing Led Zeppelin. It just didn’t fit.

I had been a music radio programmer and consultant for twenty years, so I felt like a dope when Thom said that. In our consultancy we always touted “formatic purity.” It was so simple: delight the listener with surprising choices, but never color outside the lines. Garth belongs to Country. R.E.M. belongs to Rock, etc.

(For those who are students of media theory, this late 1970s format fragmentation was the beginning of the end of mass media. Cable television came along and added a hundred channels to our twelve music formats. Then satellite radio subdivided our dozen into a hundred channels, each with a narrow base, but a lot of depth. Now we have the Internet, the ultimate tool for fragmentation. Duly, broadcast TV has seen its last 60 million household, mass audience hit show (excepting the Super Bowl), and broadcast radio has seen its last multi-format crossover hit song—we could all Sing Along With Mitch, but no one can sing along with the Dawes).

I took Thom’s observation to heart and told the Drobnys that with enough money we could start a fully formed, 24/7 format, “Progressive Talk,” and in that way, get Malloy on the radio nationally. They had done well in the market, but not that well, so they began to send me around to their rich friends and big-budget institutional organizations.

Around this time I harkened back to a project I had created for CBS Radio with the Mayo Clinic called “The Mayo Minute.” It was a great show featuring interaction between patients and the leading docs in a given field. The problem was we had an unknown physician host it. Why is that a problem? Because, according to radio, he wasn’t a famous physician. One major market programmer told us he’d run the show if we could get Marcus Welby to host (this was pre-ER and Grey’s Anatomy). So the next ingredient had to be star power. The Chicago Drobnys had spread a lot of money around Democratic circles, so they were able to introduce me to the Clintons and the Gores, who in turn introduced me to Al Franken. Al needed time to decide if he wanted the responsibility of a daily radio show. He was teaching at Harvard and writing the “Lies and Lying Liars” book, so it took the better part of a year to convince him, but he ultimately became the anchor talent around whom, with Malloy, Hartmann, Marc Maron, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, Lizz Winstead, and many other talented folks, we built Air America Radio.

I’ll spare you the rest of the Air America story, or at least save it for another day, because the points I want to make here are, it takes time and money to start a conventional, mainstream media business—Rupert Murdoch had spent $300 million before Fox News made a penny; the mainstream media is run by unimaginative executives motivated primarily by fear of failure rather than hope for gain, thus they play it safe and are not creatively inspired; and with fragmentation being driven so hard by new platforms and technologies, conquering mainstream media is, at this point, a Pyrrhic victory.

That’s the bad news for those of us who would like a place to get all manner of progressive news and programming. The good news is there is now another way.

First, I must acknowledge that we were twenty-five years behind the conservatives in talk radio, who had all the beachfront property by the time we got there. I also note that MSNBC doesn’t program 24/7 progressive content. Until now, the very limited number of radio broadcast licenses and the extremely high cost of starting a cable network have ensured the incumbents’ monopoly. Rather than chase their enormous leads and try again to start an old technology radio or cable business, it’s our goal to get in front of the next platform, the Mobile Internet.  Consider the numbers: there are already more than 100 million smartphones and tablets, growing to 1 billion by 2013, when no one will make anything but smartphones.

So, on behalf of my partners, Reed Haggard and George Vasilopoulos, I’m happy to announce the launch of the Progressive Voices Institute, Incorporated, a non-profit corporation whose first project is the Progressive Voices App. The PV App aggregates all things progressive (text, audio, video, etc.), and delivers them to the Mobile Internet.

PV App delivers news headlines, links to all progressive organizations, plays video of everyone from Jon Stewart to Rachel Maddow, and carries all the progressive radio talk show hosts live. We are particularly enamored of the way the Mobile Internet and smartphone combine to create the contemporary correlative of the transistor radio of the 1950s: they both cut the cable and liberate content. No more being tied to a computer to read, see or hear the progressive content you’re looking for. It’s right there in your pocket, on your smartphone.

If you’re interested in seeing (and hearing) it work, here’s a link to the Apple version of the App:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/progressive-voices-app/id423409073?mt=8

You’ll find the Android version here:

https://market.android.com/details?id=intertechmedia.progvoices.com

And we have a Web presence at www.ProgressiveVoices.com.

The app provides a user feedback screen that we hope you’ll use to be in touch with us, and to help us keep it growing and getting better all the time.

The time is nigh for a Progressive Media Universe! I hope you’ll join us in building it by downloading the app and telling your friends, enemies and relatives, assuming those are not all one and the same.