by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Save KLSD: Media Consolidation and Local
Radio, and I was initially depressed by the
idea of attending this one because we do all too much commemoration of defeats
on the Left (or the sorry excuse for a Left) in this country, and the issue of
KLSD, the short-lived (four years) San Diego outlet of the almost as
short-lived Air America, an attempt at a progressive network of talk radio
shows born in 2003 and died in 2010, was a major defeat. Not that I really
regarded it as one at the time: given that my roommate blasts Right-wing talk
radio throughout much of the day and night I’m all too familiar with the format
and was unimpressed the few times I actually listened to KLSD. Quite frankly I
wasn’t motivated to put much effort into saving a station I hadn’t especially liked:
I listened to Randi Rhodes’ show, reportedly the most popular on the network,
twice. Once she was interviewing peace activist Cindy Sheehan and treating her
with respect, doing the kind of intelligent interview with her I would have done, but the other she was on her own
and doing nasty, sleazeball snarkiness that enabled me to answer, once and for
all, the question, “Would I like Rush Limbaugh’s style of humor if it were
coming from someone I agreed with?” The answer: no. But a lot of people did attempt to come to the rescue of KLSD even though
the effort was foredoomed from the start. One problem with Air America’s
business model was that it depended on buying access to the air from companies
with mega-holdings in radio like Clear Channel Communications, owners of KLSD
and seven other AM radio stations in San Diego — and what giant corporations
like Clear Channel giveth, giant corporations like Clear Channel can taketh
away. Indeed, the stealth campaign against KLSD was conducted so secretly that
the executives of Clear Channel in Dallas had lowered the boom on it and
decided to pull the plug on its “progressive talk” format and replace it with
“sports talk” (there were already two other sports-talk stations on the air in
San Diego and the ratings plummeted when the format was switched) before anyone
in San Diego, including anyone actually working at the station, knew what was
going on.
Fortunately, the filmmakers — director Jon Monday and writer Jennifer
C. Douglas — didn’t dwell on the ins and outs of the KLSD campaign but made
their film much more about media consolidation in general, interviewing major
figures on what’s left of the Left media in this country — veteran PBS host
Bill Moyers (who keeps retiring and keeps un-retiring — his new show, Moyers
and Company, is fully up to the standard of
his previous ones, NOW and Bill
Moyers’ Journal, and as it happened I had
just watched the latest episode of Moyers and Company that morning featuring former screenwriter Marty
Kaplan talking about media consolidation as well as the virtual buy-out of our
political system by moneyed interests), Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Air America personality Randi Rhodes (the one who
had put me off), MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow, as well as some people including
U.S. Senators John McCain (who in 2003, when the clip featuring him at a Senate
committee hearing was shot, was still one of the good guys, more or less,
questioning media consolidation before he did his own Etch-a-Sketch act in a
vain attempt to make himself appealing to the Republican base he needed to turn
out in 2008) and Barbara Boxer, Congressmember Bob Filner, former Obama
Administration official (until he was hounded out of office by a Fox News
witchhunt) Van Jones and retired TV host Phil Donahue (who was hired by MSNBC
when it launched — and almost immediately fired when the executives in charge
resented his attacks on the war in Iraq) as well as former San Diego news
personalities Bree Walker and Marti Emerald (who ran for and won a City Council
seat in 2008 and is now fighting for her political life in a district redrawn
to favor a Latino/a candidate).
Also on the list of interviewees were two
people with a direct Zenger’s
connection: professor and media historian Robert McChesney and journalist and
media-reform activist John Nichols (McChesney is a former Zenger’s cover boy — I read an article he wrote in Monthly
Review and was so taken with what he had to
say I wanted to interview him — and Nichols, who’s collaborated with him on
some books, is a Madison, Wisconsin-based reporter I met when he was in San
Diego covering the protests against the 2001 Biotechnology Convention and who’s
been on the Zenger’s comp list
ever since), and the film went into at least part of their analysis as they’ve
expressed it in the books and articles they’ve written, jointly and severally,
about how the consolidation of the media industry into fewer and fewer hands,
and the rewriting of the government’s media laws to allow that to happen, has
not only shrunk the range of acceptable views on the air (as I like to point
out to my Right-wing friends, we don’t have a “liberal media” in this country —
we have the center-Right media of the major big-city newspapers, the
traditional broadcast networks and CNN, and the far-Right media of talk radio
and Fox News) but has virtually wiped out any local content. Radio stations are
now generally not only owned by giant conglomerates like Clear Channel but
programmed out of a central office, with a local “studio” that generally
consists of just one technician in a room assigned to ensure that the station
stays on its frequency (the film mentions the example that in New Orleans when
Hurricane Katrina hit none of the
major radio stations in the area were able to react to the emergency, and a
tiny noncommercial low-power station whose technicians were keeping it on the
air literally with car batteries
became the public-information
resource for people who needed to know what parts of the city were flooded,
what evacuation routes were possible, where they could go for needed assistance
and other stuff people facing a huge emergency like that need to know).
The film mentioned such phenomena as the
infamous “list” Clear Channel came out with after 9/11 of songs their stations
were no longer allowed to play, supposedly out of sensitivity to the victims
(among the songs placed on the interdict were “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and
“Great Balls of Fire”) but also very much according to the company’s Right-wing
agenda (the list included a flat ban on anything by the Left-wing band Rage
Against the Machine), the destruction of the Dixie Chicks’ career when Natalie
Maines, the band’s leader, said that as a Texan she was embarrassed that George
W. Bush came from their state (she said that in London, probably savoring the
novelty of being in a country where the media are far more free than they are here and where the response
to 9/11 didn’t include an organized attempt on the part of the Powers that Be
to suppress all public dissent,
no matter what slimy things Tony Blair was doing to George W. Bush’s bunghole
in his eagerness to get his country on board with Bush’s jihad against Iraq) and the big radio conglomerates
immediately pulled all the Dixie Chicks’ records off the major country
stations. (This had a chilling effect on political songwriting in general; it
sent a message to all aspiring artists that you embrace “causes,” especially Left causes, at your peril, and it’s no accident
that the only people doing political songs today are old guys like Bruce
Springsteen, Neil Young and Steve Earle who are past the peaks of their careers
anyway and therefore have nothing to lose.)
Indeed, if there’s anything I’d
fault the film on it’s that I could have wished it were more radical — it pussy-foots around the whole question
of whether the decision to kill KLSD and all the other Air America outlets on
Clear Channel stations was ideological (given that the head of Clear Channel
was not only a hard-core Republican but a major donor to the George W. Bush
campaigns, how can you deny it? Especially when it was a decision that made no
sense from strict profit-and-loss criteria); indeed, I would argue that the
media law changes, including the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald
Reagan’s FCC appointees in 1987 and the passage of the Telecommunications Act
of 1996 (signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton as the result, so this film
argues, of a compromise he reached with Republicans in Congress that in return
for safeguarding the freedom of the Internet they could have their way with
“old media,” including eliminating the caps on how many radio stations a single
individual or company could own), have been part and parcel of a deliberate,
decades-long campaign by the American Right and the corporations and wealthy
individuals that fund it (including an increasingly militant ruling class
filled with people like the Koch brothers who disdain the compromises previous
generations of corporate elites like the Rockefellers were willing to make, and
have committed themselves and their enormous fortunes to destroying all aspects
of the welfare state, ending all controls on business whatsoever and realizing
Ayn Rand’s ideal state in the U.S.) not only to establish Right-wing dominance
of American politics but to make sure that that dominance is never reversed.
As
Thomas Frank pointed out in his current book Pity the Billionaire, one of their ideological triumphs has been their
ability to convince millions of Americans that whatever problems capitalism has
can be solved with more
capitalism, with getting rid of those few pesky regulations that are left and
“unleashing the private sector.” The fact that in real life an “unleashed”
private sector drives wages to subsistence levels, either by
take-it-or-leave-it offers to American workers or by moving jobs overseas (or
threatening to do so), and thereby destroys the basis for any shared prosperity
by eliminating the middle class that provided them the market for their
products, doesn’t bother them in the slightest: as long as they have the money,
the guns and the media to shape
the public’s consciousness so that we not only get raped but enjoy the
experience and think (as John Nichols said in the movie) that things can be no
other way — that God, human nature and the framers of the U.S. Constitution all
decree that lassiez-faire is not
only the only workable but the only moral way to run an economy and a society — their power will be
unassailable.
It’s indicative of the scope of their success that no sooner had
Mitt Romney essentially locked up the Republican nomination that he suddenly,
almost overnight, pulled even with Obama in the polls — and that the main
reason people polled who were voting for Romney gave for doing so was, “He’s a
businessman, he’ll know how to fix the economy” — as if the debacle of the past
four years hasn’t affected one whit the idea that businesspeople are omniscient
and we peons dare to question their competence and sagacity at our peril. It’s
also indicative of the success of the Right’s decades-long campaign for
full-spectrum dominance of American politics, economics and public perception
that Thomas Frank’s book didn’t end with a ringing call to action for his
readers to fight the evils he’d spent his pages exposing, but with a grim
dystopian vision of what America will look like if (and one got the impression
he was merely being polite by saying “if” and not what he really thinks,
“when”) the Right gains complete control of this country — and while the makers
of Save KLSD did try to end their
movie with an inspirational call to action, it’s indicative that they literally had to go back to Bobby Kennedy to find a political
figure who embodied their call to justice and the belief that a better world
than Ayn Rand’s Libertarian dys/utopia is still possible.
