*Billionaire Activist Tom Steyer: You Want Trump Out? Buy Clear Channel*
- Billionaire Activist Tom Steyer: You Want Trump Out? Buy Clear Channel. The billion-dollar-plus cost of iHeartMedia shows how powerful & valuable the right-wing media machine has become - AlterNet, By Thom Hartmann, June 25, 2018. If liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer want to have a real and lasting impact on American politics, they should seriously think about buying a nationwide radio network. Bloomberg reports that iHeartMedia LLC, previously known as Clear Channel, is “open to takeover talks.” It’s the largest operator of radio stations in the nation. EXCERPTS:
Liberty Media made a $1.4 billion offer to buy 40 percent of the debt, and effective control, of iHeartMedia (it’s bankrupt and massively in debt because of a failed takeover by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital).. iHeart turned it down as insufficient. But with just a little more money, a progressive billionaire or two could own a nationwide radio network with virtually 100 percent penetration, and restore progressive voices to the nation’s largest stations. The billion-dollar-plus cost of iHeartMedia, along with the eye-popping profit numbers and immense political influence of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal, shows just how powerful and valuable the right-wing media machine has become.
Back in 2004 when Air America was rolled out, it was successful for as long as it was in large part because it could lease stations owned by what was then Clear Channel and is now iHeartMedia: we were on over 50 Clear Channel stations in the nation’s major markets, and drew very good ratings, even occasionally beating Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on competing Clear Channel stations.
Following a string of Democratic victories in cities and states where Clear Channel was leasing stations to Air America, the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and Thomas Lee. Soon thereafter, Clear Channel began pulling Air America’s progressive programming off the air, dramatically cutting Air America’s audience and their advertising revenue; the new progressive network was soon bankrupt..
Meanwhile the right-wing media machine continues to elect Republicans with big funding from right-wing corporations and the billionaires that own them and fund right-wing think tanks. As Ken Vogel, et al, point out in a 2011 article for Politico, “The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million [a year] to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s—and considers it money well spent.” To the best of my knowledge, none of the talkers on the left has ever been funded in such a fashion. ..But more importantly, the influence of those two well-financed talkers has altered America’s political landscape in fewer than three decades. What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the libertarian billionaires like the Kochs, understand the power of media.
But investing in political media can produce both a huge return on investment, and can transform the politics of the nation. That’s certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable...Murdoch hung on and kept pouring in the cash. And it put George W. Bush into the White House, according to several independent analyses..“In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox Effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush -- clearly a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes.”... The researchers added, Morin wrote, that, “[T]he Fox effect seems to [be] permanent and may be increasing.” And that was in 2006...
Literally hundreds of right-wing talk show hosts, both local and national, are broadcasting every day, all day, in every town or city in America. Progressive voices, on the other hand, are few and far between; in most parts of America (and virtually all of rural America), the only radio signal that carries any progressive programming whatsoever is SiriusXM, which requires a subscription and special receiver—costs that are hard to bear among voters in the reddest states where Republican policies have destroyed unions and exported jobs overseas, thus leading to widespread poverty.
This is problematic, because no democracy can survive intact when only one voice or political perspective overwhelmingly dominates any major branch of the media. The core requisite of democracy is debate. When there’s only a single predominant voice in the media, American democracy itself is at greatest risk, be that voice on the right or the left...
MORE, https://www.alternet.org/media/tom-steyer-you-want-trump-out-buy-clear-channel
*Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786 to his close friend Dr. James Currie, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” *The simple fact is that if Richard Nixon had had hundreds of radio stations in virtually every city or town in America of any consequence, with all of them running right-wing talk nonstop, it would have been difficult to impeach him. If Nixon had had Fox News in addition to all that radio power...
*If Tom Steyer wants to see Trump impeached, wants to see a semblance of balance on our airwaves, and wants a positive, healing, life-affirming progressive message available in every town in America, he should buy iHeartMedia tomorrow morning…
= new reply since forum marked as read
