The Millionaire’s Media Megaphone
Fox News, Air America, and the wealthy who shape our politics through media ownership
BY Alicia C. Shepard | September 02, 2008
Rich people live lives that most everyone else can only imagine. They can buy the nicest cars, drink the finest wines, afford the best doctors, and secure the highest priced lawyers. But when it comes to making donations to their favorite presidential candidates, they are like ordinary Americans in that the most they can donate is $2,300 per election cycle. Still, there is another way that only someone with megamillions can influence an election: buy a newspaper, radio network, or cable channel and use it to help a candidate get to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
This is what Alexander Hamilton and several of his Federalist Party allies did in 1801 when they founded The New York Evening Post to spread their anti-Jefferson views.
It is what William Randolph Hearst did when, having received The San Francisco Examiner as a gift from his father, he opened newspapers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston to further his political pursuits.
It is what the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church, did in 1982 when he started The Washington Times as a conservative antidote to The Washington Post.
And it is what Australian-born Rupert Murdoch did in 1996 when he started the Fox News Channel, which today has a reach far beyond its relatively small viewing audience. The cable channel may only have 1.5 million viewers, but when it makes news, say by trumpeting an inaccuracy or when one of its commentators attacks a guest, many other media outlets often report it and the blogosphere has a field day. As we head toward Election Day in November, there have has already been several such episodes.
In the quadrennial orgy of political spending known as “the buying of the president,” one highly effective way to spend millions is to invest in media outlets that provide political leverage. It’s perfectly legal — the campaign finance laws contain what is referred to as a “media exception” exempting from regulation the money spent on producing and distributing news stories and commentary. In some cases investments in the media not only pay political dividends but also earn dollar profits. Yet others lose money by the ton with little or no hope of profit, and the losses roll on as long as the owner thinks the political gains are worth it. Reverend Moon’s losses on The Washington Times are estimated to exceed $2 billon over a quarter century.
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At different times in our nation’s history different publishers and broadcasters have pushed different political perspectives, deciding which issues will be raised, which will be ignored, which candidates will be touted, and what should or shouldn’t be news. Hearst started out as a populist, for example, but became more conservative with age. At this moment in our history, the dominant voices among politically-potent, partisan media-owners are conservative. Only the four-year-old Air America strives to project a liberal voice, and to date it’s barely audible in most of the country, especially when measured against the giant megaphone that is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel.
Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist allies started The New York Evening Post in 1801. Now The New York Post, it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (Credit: FoundingFathers.info)Murdoch and the people who work at Fox News do not acknowledge that it has a conservative perspective; many conservatives see a comprehensive liberal bias in the mainstream media and accept the claim in Fox’s promotion: that it’s “fair and balanced.” Likewise, the unabashedly conservative and combative Bill O’Reilly says his O’Reilly Factor opinion show — it’s been the No. 1 cable show in its 8 p.m. time slot for more than seven straight years — is a “no-spin zone.”
However it is categorized, the Fox News Channel attracts a disproportionate number of conservative viewers. A recent Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 87 percent of Fox News viewers say they plan to vote in November for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and only 9 percent plan to vote for his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. Conversely, about two-thirds of the viewers of the other two cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC, say they plan to vote for Obama.
Is Fox simply a powerful magnet for conservatives? Is MSNBC, home of the ferociously liberal commentator Keith Olbermann, tilted toward liberals? Rasmussen also found that national security is the No. 1 issue for Fox viewers and that for CNN and MSNBC viewers it is the economy. What “liberal” and “conservative” mean is open to debate, and the meaning of the viewership split is open to speculation.
What is not open to speculation is that Murdoch is today’s most vividly successful media mogul with a political agenda. Like Hearst, he came into control of a newspaper as a young man — he inherited The News, in Adelaide, Australia, when he was 21 — and now his News Corporation empire is global in reach, owning not only magazines and newspapers, including The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, but also film studios, book publishers, major Internet players including MySpace, and broadcast, satellite, and cable television stations and networks that reach every continent. Now 77, he ranks No. 33 on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the world, with a net worth of $8.8 billion.
In addition to the profitable cable news channel, his News Corp. also owns The New York Post (the Evening Post that Hamilton founded), which reliably loses tens of millions annually but just as reliably provides a conservative political voice in the nation’s largest city, and The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative opinion magazine founded by Bill Kristol. “Rupert calls once every few weeks, and we chat about politics,” Kristol told The New Yorker in 2006. “I would say he’s a pragmatic conservative. He’s pro-markets, and pro-defense, but he’s not a movement conservative.” The magazine loses about $1 million a year, but with Murdoch’s vast wealth, it appears, it’s a modest price to pay for The Standard’s impact on political thinkers. (Almost all political opinion journals, from left to right on the political spectrum, operate at a loss or, like Harper’s or the liberal The American Prospect, as not-for-profit entities.)
Reverend Moon, having sunk billions into the money-losing Washington Times, is a contender for No. 2 after Murdoch in terms of investing in a media megaphone. His News World Communications, supported by Unification Church money, also owns United Press International and Insight magazine, and formerly owned a newspaper published in New York City. The church subsidizes its publishing through an array of businesses that include major real estate holdings and a major fishing fleet.
Another possible for No. 2 is Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest owners of broadcast television stations, which says its 58 stations reach about 22 percent of U.S. households. Sinclair set off controversy in the 2004 election cycle by openly promoting conservative perspectives, although CEO David D. Smith denied a political motive. To date the company has not been openly political in the current election campaign.
Adding to the conservative media din, which media critics often refer to as an “echo chamber,” is talk radio. A 2005 entry is Fox News Radio, now syndicating the audio of its TV programming to hundreds of local stations and available on satellite radio as well. The dominant talk radio hosts are conservatives — the pioneering Rush Limbaugh is No. 1 in the ratings, and Fox’s Sean Hannity, is No. 2.