Planting a flag in red America
If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit. Step into many fast food joints in rural America and the TV is likely tuned to Fox News. Drive across rural America east and west and radio is dominated by RW talk. Democrats have let this situation stand for years without responding. Will they this time?
Ryan Cooper argues that so-called “liberal media” was in the tank for Donald Trump. A lot of factors contributed to Donald Trump’s win, he writes:
But the information environment—the combination of traditional journalism, social media, party propaganda, and so on—is preposterously biased and inadequate. Trump brushed aside any of about a thousand scandals that would have sunk any previous politician. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at what their information strategy should be, and more importantly, how their messaging can be reliably and consistently put in front of voters.
Cooper recommends that “Democrats need a party publication—something to bypass the traditional media and deliver progressive messaging directly.”
Fine idea. Not going to happen. The underlying assumption is that RW outlets like Fox News, OAN, and all those other RW propaganda vehicles are arms of the Republican Party. They are not. The GOP doesn’t have the money to support them any more than Democrats do. They may be owned and operated by deep-pocketed Republicans, but are not party operations.
Cooper wants to see the left abandon mainstream outlets to build their own information ecosystem:
Websites, radio stations, podcasts, and so forth ought to be stood up by party members with access to money—the Harris campaign and associated groups, by the way, spent about $5 billion losing this election—particularly if they can replace genuine local news that has been gutted by private equity and Facebook, or if they are centered on subjects typically neglected by liberals like sports or gaming. The core strategy is to set up publications with progressive views but likely to have broader appeal. Honest partisanship should be the standard, rather than a pretend above-it-all “objective journalism” that in practice means bending reality completely beyond recognition to benefit Donald Trump.
Fine idea. Not going to happen. Too expensive up front and high maintenance. Ask Air America. Perhaps something smaller and stealthier.
What donors might support is something less ambitious but still with reach and penetration. As a pilot project in 2008, I ran local AM radio spots for months. A couple times a day on a local progressive station and during drive time on the local conservative talk station. Rather than issue- or party-driven, the 30-sec ads were more “good citizeny” but with a progressive meta-message. 1,100 spots then cost about $8k (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
As it worked out, the spots I wrote and produced were not so different from the digital ads Anat Shenker-Osorio and women from Amplify now put together (Way To Win, ASO Communications, Moira Studio, Gutsy Media, We Make the Future Action).
Perhaps Amplify might consider taking their messaging beyond the digital space into AM radio. The left has almost no presence in AM radio spaces, for example, in places like rural Arizona, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Right-wing talk and country music dominate in rural America.
AM spots are cheap earworms, and if they’re not so in-your-face about the message, even conservative station owners will run them because lefties’ money is green too. This requires no huge investment for infrastructure, just periodic purchasing and production. Amplify already has the tools, the talent, and a track record. Why reinvent the wheel? What they lack is budget for it.
An acquaintance of mine once did something similar (though not as sophisticated and tested as Anat’s work) in targeted rural radio markets on a budget of only ~$100k. The point is to deliver a tight progressive message over and over and over until people absorb it without even realizing it. That’s how commercial advertising works, isn’t it?
If you don’t show up to play, you forfeit.