Group Led By Clinton’s John Podesta Outlines Assault of Conservative Radio

http://newsbusters.org/ ^ | June 21, 2007 | Noel Sheppard

[lowbridge]

Group Led By Clinton’s John Podesta Outlines Assault of Conservative Radio

Posted by Noel Sheppard on June 21, 2007 - 13:52.

The supposedly “free speech” left are out in force trying to silence all voices in the media with views different than their own just in time for the 2008 presidential campaign.

Potentially more worrisome, one liberal advocate in the middle of this debate has close ties to the Clintons, although it is quite unlikely the press will convey such when its recommendations are disseminated with their predictable stamp of approval.

*****Update: Michelle Malkin is all over this.

With that in mind, the left-leaning Center for American Progress published a report Thursday detailing how conservatives dominate the talk radio dial, and exactly what needs to be done legislatively for liberals to wrest control over this medium (emphasis added throughout):

• Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
• Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
• Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

Imagine that.

For those unfamiliar with the Center, its President and CEO is none other than John Podesta, the former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton. And:

• The Executive Vice President for Management is Sarah Rosen, who was also a member of the Clinton administration.
• Senior Vice President for Development Debbie Goldberg worked for the Clinton campaign.
• Senior Vice President and Director David Halperin was a speech writer for President Clinton.
• Vice President of Communications Jennifer Palmieri was Clinton’s White House Press Secretary.
• Senior Vice President for External Affairs Winnie Stachelberg worked at the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton.
• Vice President of Finance and Operations Brad Kiley worked for the Clinton administration.
• Ditto Peter Rundlet, Anna Soellner, Debbie Fine, and Michelle Jolin.

In reality, the staff and Senior Fellows listing of this Center reads like a Clinton administration Who’s Who.

Starting to get the picture? As you can imagine, this is why this group is so concerned with the following statistics it shared with its readers:

• 91 percent of the political talk radio programming on the stations owned by the top five commercial station owners is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.
• 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk radio are broadcast each weekday on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk.
• 92 percent of these stations (236 stations out of 257) do not broadcast a single minute of progressive talk radio programming.

Picture becoming clearer? Yet, there was more:

• 76 percent of the total talk radio programming on the 65 stations in the top 10 markets is conservative, and 24 percent is progressive.
• 423 hours and 40 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast in the top 10 markets each weekday compared to 135 hours of progressive talk.
• More conservative talk is broadcast than progressive talk in each of the top 10 markets, although the disparity is less than five hours of total airtime in New York (18 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk vs.16 hours of progressive talk) and Chicago (33 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk vs. 29 hours of progressive talk).
• In four of the top 10 markets, progressive talk is broadcast only two hours or less each weekday (Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta).

Understand why these folks are unhappy?

Of course, as you would imagine, these folks don’t believe these statistics are at all a function of market forces. Instead:

Our view is that the imbalance in talk radio programming today is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast regulation resulting from pro-forma licensing policies,17 longer license terms (to eight years from three years previously),18 the elimination of clear public interest requirements such as local public affairs programming,19 and the relaxation of ownership rules, including the requirement of local participation in management.

Color me unsurprised. As is typical, whenever a liberal is unhappy about something, it must be because government regulations aren’t tight enough.

Yet, what is truly fascinating is that one of the “problems” concerning under-regulation of this industry was deliciously implemented during the – wait for it – Clinton years:

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed the national limit on the number of radio stations that one company could own. This resulted in the wave of consolidation that carried Clear Channel from 40 stations to over 1,200, and many other conglomerates to several hundred stations apiece.

The economics of radio station ownership changed in this period as a result of consolidation. Large, non-local owners aired syndicated programming on a wider scale across their national holdings. Advertising on local stations was marketed and sold by national firms, undermining the ability of local owners to compete. Many sold their stations. The number of locally-owned, minority-owned, and female-owned stations was constrained—and the very different programming decisions these owners make were less visible in the market.

In short, the removal of ownership limits created artificial economies of scale for syndicated programming (dominated by conservative talk). Because of the size of corporate radio holdings, this business model was profitable even if localism declined and local tastes and needs were not suitably matched.

Isn’t that marvelous? So, on the one hand, these folks – most of them members of the Clinton administration – believe that the “problem” of conservative domination over the airwaves was signed into law by – wait for it! – their previous boss, likely with some of their blessings at the time.

Yet, eleven years later, recognizing that this didn’t work out well for them, they want to enact new laws to fix the problem they created.

Isn’t that special?

Without further ado, here are their recommendations:

• National radio ownership by any one entity should not exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations.
• In terms of local ownership, no one entity should control more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market, or specifi cally, more than:
  • Four commercial stations in large markets (a radio market with 45 or more commercial radio stations).
  • Three stations in mid-markets (between 30 and 44 total commercial radio stations).
  • Two stations in smaller markets (between 15 and 29 total commercial radio stations).
  • One station in the smallest markets (14 or fewer total commercial radio stations).

[…]

We recommend the following steps the FCC should take to ensure local needs are being met:

• Provide a license to radio broadcasters for a term no longer than three years.
• Require radio broadcast licensees to regularly show that they are operating on behalf of the public interest and provide public documentation and viewing of how they are meeting these obligations.
• Demand that the radio broadcast licensee announce when its license is about to expire and demonstrate how the public can participate in the process to determine whether the licenseshould be extended. In addition, the FCC should be required to maintain a website to conduct on-line discussions and facilitate interaction with the public about licensee conduct.

And finally (fasten your seatbelts!):

Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting

If commercial radio broadcasters are unwilling to abide by these regulatory standards or the FCC is unable to effectively regulate in the public interest, a spectrum use fee should be levied on owners to directly support local, regional, and national public broadcasting.

A fee based on a sliding scale (1 percent for small markets, 5 percent for the largest markets) would be distributed directly to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with clear mandates to support local news and public affairs programming and to cover controversial and political issues in a fair and balanced manner.

We estimate that such a fee would net between $100 million and $250 million and would not overly burden commercial radio broadcasters.

As you might imagine, the first set of recommendations are a total perversion of the free-market system.

Yet, what’s potentially more amusing about all this is the final category concerning violators paying a fine to support public broadcasting.

Think about it: if the plan is to get more liberal points of view on the airwaves, and these folks are looking to get more money to public broadcasting, aren’t they basically admitting that PBS is INDEED a disseminator of liberal opinions?

Somehow they missed this delicious irony…or did they?

Of course, if a left-leaning group composed largely of Clintonistas are willing to admit the liberal bias at PBS, maybe the discussion should be whether or not government funding to this organization should be immediately halted.

Barring that, it seems logical given this group’s concern for balance in media that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, Reuters et al should have to pay moneys to Fox News, the Washington Times, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard to compensate for liberal bias in print and on television.

Now that’s a cockamamie scheme I might be able to get behind.

[xcamel]

List of "progressives" (socialists):

http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus/scholars

[xcamel]

It gets worse:

Distinguished Senior Fellow

Tom Daschle

Fellows

Mark Agrast
Eric Alterman
Aaron Chatterji
P.J. Crowley
Maria Echaveste
Henry Fernandez
Robert Gordon
Nina Hachigian
Morton Halperin
John Halpin
Bracken Hendricks
Thomas Kalil
Brian Katulis
Lawrence J. Korb
Jeanne Lambrew
Scott Lilly
Mark Lloyd
Denis McDonough
Matthew Miller
Jonathan Moreno
Joseph Romm
Fred Rotondaro
Mara Rudman
Shirley Sagawa
Shira Saperstein
Bill Schulz
Gayle Smith
Gene Sperling
Todd Stern
Peter Swire
Ruy Teixeira
Dan Tarullo
Daniel J. Weiss
Christian E. Weller

Special Advisors

Ivo Daalder
Mark Greenberg

Administration

Erin Green, Internship Program Manager
Tyler Hall, Facilities Coordinator
Mildred Hardin, Accountant II/Accounts Payable Supervisor
Susan Anderson, Accountant I
Angelo Lomax, Receptionist
Omar McCrimmon, Receptionist
Kaliope Poulianos, Director of Administration
Surin Ramkissoon, Director of Finance
Jasmine Taylor, Office Manager

Academic Affairs

Sam Davis, Policy Analyst

California Office

Anna Soellner, Vice President for Communications and Deputy Director of the California Office

Campus Progress

Ben Adler, Editor
Tamia Booker, Campus Speakers Bureau Associate Manager
Pedro de la Torre, Organizing and Outreach Associate Manager
Dana Goldstein, Associate Editor
Shereen Hall, Webmaster and Online Strategy Coordinator
Emily Hawkins, Issue Campaigns and Campus Publications Manager
Rupa Mohan, Iraq Events Organizer
Ramya Raghavan, Associate Manager of Organizing and Outreach
Keisha Senter, Manager of Speakers Bureau and Strategic Partnerships
Jesse Singal, Associate Editor
Madhuri Singh, Special Assistant to the Director

Communications

Vanessa Cardenas, Ethnic Media Director
Matt Corley, Research Associate
Paige Fitzgerald, Special Events Coordinator
Ben Furnas, Research Assistant for MicCheck
Sean Gibbons, Director of Media Strategy
Grant Ginder, Research Assistant
Annalee Gulley, Special Events Coordinator
Christy Harvey, Director of Strategic Communications
Satyam Khanna, Research Associate
Theo LeCompte, Media Strategy Manager
Merrill McDermott, Special Assistant to SVP for Communications and Strategy
Nadia Reiman, Radio Coordinator
John Neurohr, Press Assistant
Teresita Perez, Deputy Speechwriter
Nico Pitney, Deputy Research Director
Faiz Shakir, Research Director
Amanda Terkel, Associate Editor
Marlene Cooper Vasilic, Director of Outreach and Special Events

Development & Strategic Planning

Liz Fujii, Major Gifts Manager
Rebecca Leonard, Major Gifts Officer
Amber Massey, Manager of Development Communications
Linda Rotunno, Director of Development

Domestic Policy

Jessica Arons, Director of Women’s Health and Rights Program
Kit Batten, Director of Environmental Policy
Cynthia Brown, Director of Education Policy
Robin Chait, Senior Education Policy Analyst
Karen Davenport, Director of Health Policy
Benjamin Goldstein, Research Associate
Meredith King, Health Policy Research Analyst
Elena Rocha, Senior Education Analyst
Reece Rushing, Director of Regulatory and Information Policy
Sally Steenland, Senior Policy Advisor for Faith and Progressive Policy

Economic Policy

Sara Aronchick, Research Assistant
John Irons, Director of Tax and Budget Policy
Jonathan Jacoby, Associate Director for International Economic Policy
Amanda Logan, Special Assistant
Joshua Picker, Research Associate
Kate Sabatini, Research Associate
Tim Westrich, Research Associate

Executive

Elizabeth Cooley, Executive Assistant to the President and CEO
Lauren Dunn, Special Assistant to the Executive VP for Policy
Praveen Madhiraju, Legal Counsel
Natalie Ondiak, Executive Assistant to the President and CEO
Juliana Gendelman, Administrative Assistant to Executive Office

External Affairs

Peter Churchill, Associate Director for CRM and Outreach Technology
Mia Griswold, Database and Outreach Assistant
Brian Komar, Director of Strategic Outreach and Alliances
Gavriel Kullman, Email Marketing Manager
Natalie Pojman, Special Assistant
Derrick Richardson, Senior Manager of State and Regional Affairs
Ilia Rodriguez, Director of Governmental Affairs

Fellows

Samuel Berger, Assistant
Michael Fuchs, Research Associate
Kari Manlove, Assistant
Anne Shoup, Assistant

National Security

Max Bergmann, Research Associate
Spencer P. Boyer, Director of International Law and Diplomacy
Jake Caldwell, Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade & Energy
Winny Chen, Special Assistant
Andrew J. Grotto, Senior Analyst
Ken Gude, Associate Director, International Rights & Responsibility
Calista Johnson, Special Assistant
Stephanie Miller, Research Assistant for The Americas Project
Peter Ogden, Senior Policy Analyst
Victoria Palomo, Special Assistant to the Senior VP
Lisa Rogoff, Field Manager of ENOUGH
Rebecca Schultz, Research Associate
Anita Sharma, Executive Director of ENOUGH
Caroline Wadhams, Senior Policy Analyst

Online Communications

Tim Ball, Unix Systems Administrator
J.R. Boynton, Director of Web Products
Joel Hardi, Director of Web Technology
Rhon Hayes, Microsoft Systems Administrator
Erin Lindsay, Online Marketing Manager
Ed Paisley, Editorial Director
Andrew Pratt, Special Assistant
Matt Pusateri, Senior Designer
Alex Pryor, Manager of A/V Technology
Shannon Ryan, Graphic Designer
Laura Sahramaa, Assistant Editor
Noah Schubert, Online Editor
Annie Schutte, Online Editor
Mark Steele, Software Developer
Will Thomas, Director of Information Technology
Adorna Williams, Art Director

[sourcery]

We should be teaching the Left the principle of reciprocity: Put forward similar (or worse) attacks against their sources of news and information (e.g., PBS, NPR, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.)

[AdvisorB]

The neo-communist leftist progressives are in control of the ‘RAT party. If hitlary was honest, she would have chosen the Communist Internationale as her campaign theme song.

It’s as if the fellow traveler, Henry Wallace, had wrested control of the ‘RAT party from Harry Truman in 1948. Harry must be spinning in his grave like a flywheel.

[reefdiver]

Nothing they can do.. They are the minority, crazy aunt in the attic. The whole bunch only gets in when the rest of us get pissed over something.

[Freee-dame]

Did they forget the 10 minutes of network news that spouts anti-Amrican, anti-conservative agenda-driven reports every hour on the hour and on the half-hour? That would be 16% for the left before even looking at content.

Liberals feeeel; they don't think. Not many people want to converse with someone's feeeelings so liberal talk radio flops. When the left is willing to engage in fact-based dialogue, it will do much better at talk radio.

[PGalt]

Great post. Thanks to Noel Sheppard. Internal Enemies Device. BTTT!

[antceecee]

Geez, maybe if they’re lucky they can get Hugo Chavez on their Board of Directors. I’m sure he can offer some sound socialist advice.

[Viking2002]

BOHICA time. When the sewer scrapings of American culture can't entice the average man with their progressive stench, they go after capitalism and the First Amendment to force it up you. It's for your own good, ya see. They know better than you do what you need. They were simply born better. And remember: it's for the children.

[Publius6961]

Our view is that the imbalance in talk radio programming today is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system

As I understand it, the "regulatory system" is in place exclusively to prevent chaos in the use of physically availble frequencies, never, ever can it be allowed to address content.

The first Amendment consists of very simple unambiguous words, and can never be allowed to control content, particularly in the area for which it was created, political discussion.

[WonkyTonky]

They must have forgot the failure that was Air America. Conservative talk radio only exists because there is a market for it, if people could get objective news from their TV sets and newspapers, there would be NO market for conservative talk radio!

All those Clintonistas want to do now is try to get rid of conservative talk radio because they know the election is coming and they don’t want the hosts bringing up Hillary’s past, particularly when she was First Lady. That’s why you are seeing the push now instead of 2-3 years ago.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the list of names.

[lowbridge]

We should be teaching the Left the principle of reciprocity:

True, sometimes the left forgets that the law is a fair two way street. However, I think they believe that they can unfairly enforce the Fairness Doctrine against us, and that it wont apply to them. Truth is I think they will be correct on that point. The last time the Fairness Doctrine was in force, the conservative voice was soundly squashed while the liberal voice was amplified.

[JustDoItAlways]

The problem with the Left is that they do not understand economics.

The domination of talk radio by conservatives comes from the fact that people like listening to intelligent talk radio commentary. It is not a systematic problem.

People listen to Rush because he is smart, the show is informative and it is worth listening to.

Leftist talk radio is about boring, emotional, protest and few think it is worth listening to in the long-run.

Sure, some new law could shut-down talk radio. It will just move to some other medium anyway and the Leftists don’t understand that you cannot control people 24/7. You can only let them do what they do, what they want to do within some system of law and order. It is really the fundamental thought defect of the Left.

[gathersnomoss]

So, if you can’t compete, the government steps in? Seems to work quite well for the Post Office and public schools, doesn’t it.

[Let's Roll]

“When the left is willing to engage in fact-based dialogue, it will do much better at talk radio”

And that, of course, they don’t dare do - stick to facts.

[Publius6961]

Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations

I do belive that "enforceable public interest obligations", by definition, are unconstitutional.
Extortion is no more acceptable if administered by bureaucrats, than it is when enforced by the mob...

[sanjacjake]

Last of the scared electorate....if you can’t beat
them..get the couirts behind you, with Congress leading
the way...Heil Hitler time....you ignorant and lazy
Clinton hangers on....be ready for a backlash...with
all the trimmings....JK

[WyCoKsRepublican]

While this is a serious threat posed by the Soviet Democrats (credit to Rush) to squander free speech, maybe we could consider a “counter punch.” We know liberal radio has failed, and continues to fail. Conservative talk radio could become stronger from all this. We just need to shout louder and play the left’s game of fear and intimidation. We have an advantage: The Truth. The Lord works in mysterious ways. The Great Oz has spoken.