Why Air America Matters
by Thom Hartmann
There are times when doing the profitable thing is also doing the
right thing.
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. It's what Reverend Moon believes, as his
Washington Times newspaper lost hundreds of millions of dollars and, according
to some reports, even today continues to lose money. And its what the people
who have made Air America Radio possible - names you probably wouldn't
recognize because they've invested millions of their own money but don't seek
the limelight - believe.
Each of these endeavors hit nail-biting times.
In Murdoch's early days building News Corp. (which then helped fund
Fox News), as The Hollywood Reporter noted in a 2005
article<http://mk1.netatlantic.com/t/85996/1344934/348/0/>:
"[C]orporate expansion and the stock market crash of 1987
conspired to create a financial crisis for Murdoch in 1990, when News Corp.
reported revenue of $6.7 billion and saw more than $7 billion in debt come due.
With News Corp. shares plummeting from $24 to $8 as a result of the Black
Monday crash and Murdoch's buying sprees continuing unabated, creditors became
nervous. A refinancing plan was put in place, but at the last minute, one small
bank in Pittsburgh refused to go along with the scheme, demanding repayment of
a $10 million loan.
"That $10 million loan nearly caused the entire collapse of News
Corp.: An extraordinary race against time ensued in which Murdoch and his
financial advisers struggled to convince the company's 100-plus creditors to
agree to a deal by which they would all be paid at the same time. Only at the
eleventh hour did the Pittsburgh bank capitulate, to Murdoch's great relief.
"The mogul managed to get through the ordeal without parting with
substantial blocks of stock, which likely would have forced him to lose control
of the company he created (a fate that befell his rival, Turner). At one point,
though, Murdoch reportedly did have to sign over as security personal assets,
including his New York penthouse."
There was, however, a happy ending (for Murdoch), which helped fund
the money-losing Fox News Network:
"Today, the studio and the Fox owned-and-operated stations are
News Corp.'s cash machines."
Brit Hume noted, in a 1999 interview with
PBS<http://mk1.netatlantic.com/t/85996/1344934/349/0/>:
"This operation loses money. It doesn't lose nearly as much as it
did at first, and it's -- well, it's hit all its projections in terms of, you
know, turning a profit, but it's - it will lose money now, and we expect for a
couple more years. I think it's losing about $80 million to $90 million a year."
This is not, of course, to celebrate losing money. It's just a
demonstration of the old truism that sometimes "it takes money to make money."
And sometimes it takes money to make a difference in the world, as well.
While Fox News and The Washington Times have devoted themselves to
promoting the interests of America's most wealthy, most of the programming of
Air America Radio has been committed to discussions of labor, the middle class,
and holding up the founding ideals of this nation. These were best expressed by
America's first liberal president, George Washington, when he said: "As Mankind
becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct
themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the
protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost
nations of justice and liberality."
Liberal or conservative, the nation has often moved as its media
has moved.
Rupert Murdoch's investment in Fox News not only produced profits
for him, it changed America. As Richard Morin noted in The Washington Post on
May 4, 2006, in an article titled "The Fox News
Effect"<http://mk1.netatlantic.com/t/85996/1344934/350/0/>:
"'Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its
voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion
effect,' said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely and
Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.
"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."
Similarly, Air America Radio may have had a significant effect in
awakening people across the United States to positive liberal alternatives to
the conservative vision of Fox and Bush. In a democracy, which depends on a
vital and ongoing exchange of free ideas for its survival, this is essential.
It's a tragedy that for the lack of an investor the size of Rupert
Murdoch Air America is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But its existence and ongoing
presence in the marketplace is an essential part of the dialogue that is known
as democracy.
In a letter about Shay's Rebellion, which some argued was incited
by newspapers, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"The people are the only censors of their governors; and even
their errors will tend to keep them to the true principles of their
institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only
safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular
interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs,
through the channel of public papers, and to contrive that those papers should
penetrate the whole mass of the people.
"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the
very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to
decide, whether we should have a government without newspapers, ore newspapers
without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But
I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of
reading them."
Had radio existed in 1783, Jefferson would have probably expressed
similar sentiments about it.
As 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."
But ever since Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act of 1881, leading to an explosion of acquisitions and mergers,
and Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, leading to an even
more startling concentration of media in a very few hands, freedom of the press
in America has become as much a economic as a political issue. This is
problematic, because no democracy can survive with only one voice in the media.
Back in the years when I often visited Russia, the well-work joke
that everybody knew had to do with the names of the two biggest newspapers,
Pravda and Ivestia. "Pravda" is a Russian word that translates as "truth" and
"Ivestia" means "news." The joke every Russian can recite from memory is:
"There?s no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia."
As Russians well learned, single-party-news is corrosive to
democracy. Jefferson made his comment about newspapers being vital to America
just at the time he was being most viciously attacked in the newspapers. 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.
Losing the voices of Air America would harm this nation, just as
much as would losing the voices of conservative talk radio.
We need them all to really be America.
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times
bestselling author of 17 books, and host of a nationally syndicated daily
progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network. His most recent
book is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do
About It."<http://mk1.netatlantic.com/t/85996/1344934/351/0/>
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