Inside the fight to overcome America's dangerous right-wing media machine

Vladimir Putin understands better than Democrats and Democratic donors how to seize control of a nation. And Democrats damn well better learn the lesson, and fast. Forget about the economy and even abortion: it’s the media, stupid!

When Putin wanted the Central African Republic (CAR) to give him multiple gold and mineral mines in that resource-rich country, the first thing his agent, Yevgeny Prigozhin, did was to buy a radio station and start running propaganda about the benefits of the CAR creating closer ties to Russia.

Similarly, when Putin wanted to put Trump into the White House, he had Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency — a massive, well-funded troll farm based in St. Petersburg — use swing-state polling and other internal RNC confidential information to send more than 100 million targeted Facebook impressions to swing state Americans.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and a former employee who took over $10 million from one of Putin’s favorite oligarchs, handed that data off to Russian intelligence, leading in part to his going to prison (Trump pardoned him and is now talking about bringing him back into the 2024 campaign). Twenty-six of Putin’s IRA people were similarly indicted by the Mueller investigation, although American law has not been able to reach them in Russia.

READ: The real reason Republicans oppose efforts to cancel student debt

Another example is Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orbán: in both cases, they used — just as Trump is promising to do here if he is reelected — libel laws to drive “normal” and progressive radio, newspapers, and TV out of business and replaced them with the equivalent of Fox “News” owned by friendly oligarchs, proclaiming the wonders of Putin and Orbán all day, every day.

Autocrats and fascists, it seems, know the importance of media ownership (Hitler and Mussolini also took over radio and newspapers during their time). Why this simple lesson is lost on wealthy progressives is confounding.

The main reason the GOP has so much power in Congress is that in low-population rural states the only voices on the radio are promoting Republicans. There are over 1500 rightwing commercial radio stations, and around 900 religious nonprofit stations, all blasting out a pro-Republican message 24/7. They quite literally reach into every nook and cranny — no matter how rural or obscure — of America.

On the progressive/Democratic side, there are only a handful of large commercial stations across the nation, almost entirely located in big cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. SiriusXM, which also carries my program weekdays from noon-3 PM ET, is the only national alternative for progressive talk radio, but requires a satellite receiver and a paid subscription.

Similarly, the giant corporations that control the majority of search and social media have a pronounced rightward tilt. When Google stopped spidering Alternet.org about a decade ago, for example, it so wiped out that site that they had to sell themselves to an entrepreneur.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg had private dinners in the White House with Trump, and Elon Musk is openly implying that Democrats represent a threat to America. Progressives don’t see the algorithmic amplification of their messages that conservatives do on either of those platforms, even though the country is politically roughly 50/50.

(Apologists for the platforms will argue that’s because the algorithms are designed to promote “hot/emotional” content and rightwingers are more likely to create inflammatory content, but because these companies continue to keep their algorithms secret there’s no way to confirm any claims made, by me or them.)

Every four years, Democratic donors — particularly large Democratic donors — put literally billions of dollars into campaigns for Democratic candidates. If they’d simply purchased a few hundred strategically located radio stations (particularly in rural areas) they’d have gotten a much better return on their investment. In rural areas where people regularly drive long distances just for routine things like shopping, radio is still incredibly important: Red states would begin to flip purple and then Blue just in time for elections.

For example, in the past few years Republican-aligned businessmen have bought over 300 Spanish-language radio stations across the country and put on them rightwing Spanish-language hosts. The result is clear today: the Hispanic vote is bending toward Trump.

In 2004, when Air America was rolled out (I wrote the original business plan), it was successful for as long as it was in large part because our programs were carried by leased stations owned by what was then Clear Channel and is now iHeartMedia: we were on more than 50 Clear Channel stations in almost all of the nation’s major markets.

Following a string of Democratic victories in cities and states where Clear Channel was carrying Air America shows, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and Thomas Lee.

When Mitt Romney decided to run for president in 2012, Clear Channel began pulling Air America’s progressive programming off the air, dramatically cutting Air America’s audience and their advertising revenue. My “home station,” Portland’s KPOJ, was flipped by Romney‘s company to sports just a few months before the 2012 election.

Lacking that critical mass of audience to support advertising revenue, the progressive network was soon bankrupt, and two years later so was Clear Channel (because of the debt load dumped on it by Romney’s business model), then reincarnated as iHeartMedia.

Meanwhile, the right-wing social and traditional media machine continues to elect Republicans with big funding from right-wing corporations and the billionaires who own them and fund right-wing think tanks.

As Ken Vogel et al pointed 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 have ever been funded in such a fashion. Small wonder that Hannity now owns a real estate empire worth tens of millions, and Limbaugh, before he died, could brag of an eight-figure net worth or more.

But more important, the influence of these well-financed talkers has altered America’s political landscape in less than three decades. What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the rightwing billionaires, understand the power of media (and took Lewis Powell’s advice to get control of America’s media).

When George W. Bush was president, twice a year he invited talk radio hosts to broadcast live from the lawn of the White House and made administration officials available for interviews. Obama stopped the practice, probably because there are so few stations programming progressive content: it was during his presidency that Romney’s Bain Capital took down Air America.

I’ve written about this for years, including major pieces in The Nation and on Salon, but Democratic donors — being pushed by Democratic consultants who make their money from commissions on placing commercials — have largely ignored this gaping hole in the Democratic media world.

As a result, Red states are redder than ever and Republicans are following the inclinations of rightwing radio hosts who offer them a built-in national echo chamber, putting democracy itself at risk. Hannity had a huge influence over Trump and Republicans across the country appear on shows with these hosts daily.

Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, for example, recently revealed that if his bipartisan legislation to secure the southern border passed the Senate, a talk radio host:

“[T]old me flat out, ‘If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you because I do not want you to solve this before the presidential election.’”

Nationally syndicated rightwing host Jesse Kelly later claimed credit for the threat. Good for the GOP, bad for America.

I pushed this idea of Democratic donors buying radio stations hard during the Obama administration, even bringing the topic up in a meeting at the White House. Bernie Sanders helped organize a group of legislators to listen to a presentation suggesting this by me and a handful of other Air America talk hosts. Our goal was to encourage them to reach out to big Democratic donors to invest in progressive media.

The legislators listened respectfully, but when their chance to respond to our proposal came, Senator Hillary Clinton suggested that such things were best left to the “free market.” A congressman then suggested that NPR was doing a fine job of educating people, so why should they create a progressive network?

The meeting went downhill from there.

Which brings us to the current moment.

There are some indications that at least one major Democratic donor is looking into buying radio stations. As Semphor recently reported:

“Over the last two years, Soros Fund Management, the firm founded by the billionaire investor and now controlled by the Open Society Foundations, has become an increasingly key player in the oldest electronic mass media: radio.
“In February, the company became the largest shareholder in Audacy, the bankrupt second-largest radio company in the U.S., with more than 230 U.S. stations and a podcast arm that includes Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Studios. In 2022, Soros invested an undisclosed amount in Crooked Media, the liberal podcast network behind the ultra-popular Pod Save America.”

If it works out, it’s a beginning. But we have miles to go to catch up with the massive rightwing media machine that includes three television networks, over two thousand radio stations, and thousands of podcasters and conservative talk hosts given the opportunity because of that infrastructure.

It’s time to get started!

NOW READ: Former FBI official accuses Marjorie Taylor Greene of spreading foreign propaganda