Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
When people tell me that we have a free press, I ask them, "Where is the union channel? Where is the feminist channel? On which religion channel can I regularly hear mainstream religious broadcasts, as opposed to John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy?" Where is the channel for university students? Why do I have to look for ACORN and other community groups on 'community cable,' rather than network news?"
What gets on TV is much more conservative, white, and affluent than America (not to mention a h--l of a lot stupider).
Television shows some country I don't know.
While competition is restricted in the broadcast media market, your paranoid conspiracy theory that Chomsky and others have been shut out by media gatekeepers is so pre-internet.
Chomsky is not a trained historian, economist, or sociologist. He's a linguist, and his scholarship is a neat and obnoxious as a grade school grammarian's pedantry.
You guys can't even see contrarian evidence proof you literally have your hands on it.
--spectator
Thirteen percent of the working population are members of a union. If there are 100 channels, one would expect that two or three might deal with union issues. There are no channels.
The majority of the religious population are moderates. Yet what is represented on television is disproportionately crackpot, extremist, right-wing... but I repeat myself.
There are millions of university students, who share common issues: how to study, how to take tests, how to plan a career, how to fit marriage and college together, what kinds of jobs are available and pay well, not to mention music, movies, and so on. They have no channels.
And, yes, there are lots of feminists, especially if one gets beyond the half million dues paying members of NOW. Many, many more than there are members of CPAC or most conservative organizations.
But please, do stay in your delusional world.
Your buddies at Air America have already gone a step further than you by acting on their conviction that there is a vast untapped media market in the US. You know how they did.
Then, of course, there is the wildly successful Pacifica Radio.
--spectator
There's a book about it, called the Bible. You might want to read it.
He had and has rich conservative sugar daddies who were willing to lose a few million (and to spend a few tens of millions lobbying to repeal the Fairness Doctrine) and wait a number of years for their plans to bear fruit.
In the early days of his "going national", his program was virtually given away to cash-strapped rural radio stations looking for cheap ways to fill air time. Once a few dozen of these were racked up, Limbaugh's backers then started to crack the bigger cities. Limbaugh didn't start turning a monetary profit for his backers until then, but that wasn't the point: Disinformation was the point.
FOX News has had a similar path: It spent the first few years of its existence propped up, as was the rest of the FOX network, by the hugely-profitable cartoon show The Simpsons. To this day, the FOX network's financials are so murky that there's some question as to whether the company has ever turned a genuine profit ( for one thing, they can't charge as much for ads as can other networks because their programming, Simpsons aside, is generally not the sort of stuff with which advertisers want to be associated). But again, turning a monetary profit isn't the point: Spreading disinformation is.
This is why tighty-righties keep obsessing over George Soros more than any liberal I know: It's because the right-wingers are so used to seeing sugar daddies propping up their otherwise-unprofitable institutions that they just assume that the rest of the world does that, too
What a concise description of this blog.
--spectator
Remember, just because you believe it and it fits into your paranoid delusions, doesn't make it true.
Finally, there's no point in arguing with hardcore ideologues. Plus you have no audience to speak of, and I'm not gonna bother debunking the proliic stream of nonsense if there isn't one sane person watching. No, I'll content myself with lobbing the ocassional grenades and having some fun with you and your small circle of jwerps.
--spec
Let me make one more effort at talking to you as an adult. The Fox profitability, or lack thereof, is well-known. As of 2003, they were barely breaking even. At the peak of their success, they were making ca. $100M in 2003... after running losses of ca. $300M. With the catastrophic recent drop in viewership, it would be surprising if they are still breaking even.
That took me a grand total of five minutes to find.
Why are you so lazy and ignorant?
You think you are "dropping grenades." What you are actually doing is "being an ass."
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