Get real, people
An online acquaintance once belonged to the Democracy Alliance, a gaggle of liberal millionaire/billionaires formed in 2005 as a lefty counterpart to the Koch donor network. Yes, they’ve done some things to advance the cause, as Michael Tomasky notes below. But conservative moneybags are long-term political investors willing to sink hundreds of millions in media outlets to bend the country’s will over time to theirs. Rich liberals tend to eschew deferring gratification in favor of near-term electoral wins. They want trophies they they can show off to friends the way congressman pose for photos in front of new destroyers. IIRC, my friend left Democracy Alliance in frustration over that, and later the country.
Michael Tomasky opines on David Smith’s purchase of The Baltimore Sun at The New Republic:
But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night.”
I’ve been watching this develop for decades. The right-wing media was a thing long ago, but it was still easily drowned out by the mainstream media. If the mainstream media was a beach ball, the right-wing media was a table tennis ball.
Today? The mainstream media, with cuts like those endured by the Sun, is maybe a volleyball, and the right-wing media is a basketball—a little bigger. And it’s on its way to beach-ball-hood. The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.
And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.
The right plays a long game. Read “Democracy in Chains.”
Nonprofit media such as ProPublica do impressive work, but as nonprofits IRS rules require they be nonpartisan at a time when money-losing media outlets owned by right-wing ideologues labor under no such limits. The right’s media machine is loud and proud. We once called it The Mighty Wurlitzer.
The Democracy Alliance was started to grow a countervailing progressive infrastructure, Tomasky explains:
It helped seed the Center for American Progress, designed as liberalism’s answer to the Heritage Foundation. It helped grow groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. On the media front, it funded Media Matters for America, the broad left’s leading media watchdog outfit.
But there is one job liberal benefactors have refused to take on (with a few exceptions, starting with the owner of this very magazine). The cost has been enormous. And by the way—this story isn’t over. By a long shot. I’m certain David Smith wants to buy more struggling newspapers and turn them into MAGA sheets. And there are surely mini-Sinclairs in formation. Prager University’s right-wing misinformation videos are gaining a foothold in some public schools. Right-wing outlets have zero interest in sharing the “media space” with the mainstream media. They want to crush it.
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What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.
Digby founded Hullabaloo. Josh Marshall has Talking Point Memo. Markos and Co. still have Daily Kos. None of us own daily newspapers or TV channels or have the means for buying any. Air America (March 2004) began as a broadcast alternative to right-wing talk that dominates radio across red states. Funding was always tenuous. Competing for broadcast space against conservative networks with more powerful stations, it lasted barely six years before folding. * Conservative ideologues don’t expect their partisan ventures to make money. And they offset their losses by purchasing networks of stations that do.
The left cannot give up the Enlightenment notion that the truth will set us free, that truths are self-evident, as the Declaration says. Give people the facts and, as rational beings, they’ll reach the same conclusions as ours. Uh-huh. Or the notion that people [grinds teeth] should vote their best interests as the left defines them. Or that our self-evident ideas sell themselves. They don’t. There’s an entire industry named for a street in Manhattan that spends billions to market consumer products. Democrats resist spending to sell their ideas.
*Some friends and I once produced and ran progressive 30-second radio commercials in our rural-ish market for diddly-squat just to demonstrate that that could be done for small money. Just because we couldn’t compete with the Limbaughs minute for minute and hour for hour was no reason to forfeit the airwaves to them.