Will it be billionaire John Malone who took the helm at CNN two years ago with the expressed intent to "push CNN back to hard news, and away from red-hot liberal opining."
Former CNN chairman Chris Licht, in a pathetic attempt to court the right-wing hate media audience, instructed staff to stop referring to Donald Trump's discredited claim the 2020 election was stolen from him as "the big lie" because it sounds too much like a "Democratic Party talking point."
Will it be Robert Iger, Disney Chairman and former CEO of ABC?
Paul Verna, principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, explained, "The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business. That's why Comcast did what it did today."
Progressive author and talk show host on the SiriusXM Progress channel, Thom Hartmann, who wrote the original business plan for the defunct Air America radio, explained recently:
Will America's media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to "substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing."
Air America radio was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.
My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama's 2008 election.
That same year, Mitt Romney's private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he'd run against Obama in the next election.
As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.
Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.
The media is as "liberal" as the corporations that own it, and those corporations thrive on horse race because it's how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people interested in staying rich (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), their personal fortunes depend on this. This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.
Image credit: Ground NewsMillionaires and billionaires should not "own" our media.
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