Another truth is that it has been one of the Republican agendas for several decades to seize control of the airwaves via mergers that facilitate crowding out disparate voices. The Bush administration provided the added thrust that has made it possible for listeners from Bangor to Burbank to tune in to Rush or Sean or Bill or Neil or Glenn or Michael at three or four, or more, locations in every market. Progressive talk, a relatively recent phenomenon, has been relegated to 3d and 4th tier frequencies with very limited range and frequently very poor reception.
Let’s exchange one Right wing fallacy — or, more accurately, bald-faced lie — with another truth of the matter. The Right likes to claim how, via the dailies, listeners repeatedly manifest their preferences for them, over the progressive programs. Progressive talk personalities, Stephanie Miller (See PS below), Ed Schultz, Tom Hartmann, and Randi Rhodes, time after time after time generate greater patronage than do Rush and sidekicks in the markets where they can be heard! The distortions that weigh heavily in favor of the Righties are entirely because of the way the mergers noted previously make it so incredibly difficult for potential listeners to find a station that carries anything from the progressive perspective. It’s as close to a vertically integrated monopoly as one can conjure.
Regardless that so many choose to, it’s rather difficult to take with any honest level of seriousness a claim that one side is preferred over another when the latter is denied by the former anything close to an equal field upon which to compete.
— Ed Tubbs
(PS re Stephanie Miller. In a C-SPAN interview with the station’s Brian Lamb, that aired yesterday, Sunday, February 8, (http://www.q-and-a.org/Program/?ProgramID=1218), Stephanie Miller, daughter of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 vice-presidential running mate, Congressman William Miller, was asked questions concerning what the Right alleges is the Left’s efforts to close down conservative arguments via reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine. As you can hear and see for your self, Ms. Miller made it clear that it would be an undesirable step rearward, that not a single progressive commentator has remotely argued for it, and that what is needed is not a governmental requirement the public’s airwaves be employed fairly, to foster robust debate available to listeners across the country. This, Miller insisted, was a policy the mega-broadcasting corporations ought to institute as a civic responsibility, but not one the federal government should get involved with.)
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