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Time to take over the MSM, not just change it

Time to take over the MSM, not just change it

The impossibility of changing the liberal bias in the mainstream media is almost a daily topic here.

Reader Brian sent this email with some pertinent thoughts on the topic, which I thought I’d pass along:

I’ve had your blog in my RSS feed for awhile and find your commentary insightful.

It is not a great surprise that the mainstream media is mostly liberal in its staff and work product even though the public is about 50/50 in political ideology and voting patterns.

For the longest time conservatives have complained about this bias, but until Murdoch came along to establish Fox News as a national news network, the only outlets conservatives had (aside from talk radio) were niche publications like the National Review and minor (and ignored) newspapers like the Washington Times.

Despite the success of Fox News, the media remains overwhelmingly biased with the Huffington Post (formed originally in 2005 to counter the influential Drudge Report) as the embodiment of its liberal soul.

What confounds me is why if the portrayal of conservatives by liberals is accurate–the party of the rich, for the rich–that the “millionaires and billionaires” haven’t taken them up on their stereotyping and done something about it.

Almost all of the largest media companies are publicly traded corporations. In the past decade, several media properties including most newspapers have come up for sale because of the impact of the Internet has had on their revenues. Rich conservatives could have bought them and put their own imprimatur on them, but except for the Wall Street Journal which Rupert Murdoch bought, they stayed away.

The Koch brothers are billionaires and vilified by liberals. In 2009, NBC Universal was up for sale. They could have bought it and put their libertarian ideas to work in the how NBC covers news, NBC programs TV entertainment and Universal produces movies, but they didn’t. Instead they are pouring their money into political campaigns to elect politicians to fend off regulations of Koch Industries.

Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, would rather spend $100 million to fund political ads than spend a buck to buy Newsweek when it was literally offered for sale for one dollar (now owned by Tina Brown’s liberal the Daily Beast).

Private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman is a mega-donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign and is known for his million dollar birthday parties. He could have bought a lucrative interest in the New York Times in 2008, but passed, letting it go to a Mexican billionaire.

What I see over and over again are rich liberals willing to invest in keeping their ideas in the public conversation through ownership of major media properties, but rich conservatives (excluding Murdoch) either opting out or contributing to political campaigns, using them as a vehicle in a roundabout way to spread their ideas.

If conservatives don’t like the way the media talks about them and their ideas, they have the ability to change the narrative if what liberals say about them are true.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that these media properties are not generally good investments.

Additionally, it would be hard to change the culture at these places, since journalism schools churn out liberal foot soldiers, and Hollywood churns out anti-conservative anti-Christian anti-American product with ease.

Nonetheless, I think the general concept is valid.

At a certain point trying to change the unchangeable requires a new strategy, because the current strategy is not working as this past week demonstrates.

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Comments

One must start younger. The MSM couldn’t go full Left until the table had been set by the educational system and the obsessive push to get women out of the home. And as long as we’re not home to educate our children, hirelings will teach them to hate us.

At this point, the MSM, entertainment and games are educating our children faster and better than most tenured union hacks can. Faster than most parents can keep up with.

    One must start younger. The MSM couldn’t go full Left until the table had been set by the educational system

    This!

    My sentiments exactly. Now, what can we do to help women understand that raising children is more important work than bringing home the bacon? This idea is also undermined in our education system and entertainment industry, not to mention that it is unwelcome news to corporations. The rot in our culture goes pretty deep; what can be done to root it out?

    Let’s bring a sense of honor back to the idea of a father who supports his family sufficiently so that the mother of his children is able to stay at home and raise the kids. Let’s not denigrate the woman who chooses wisely an ambitious husband who earns the kind of money that gives her the freedom to raise her children at home — the gold-digger term for these women should be retired forever. Even households of modest means should strive to forego acquisitiveness for the sake of raising decent, law-abiding, self-sufficient — and civilized — children and inculcating traditional values that are a bulwark against statism.

    Remember, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

      Juba Doobai! in reply to HarrietHT. | September 1, 2012 at 7:04 pm

      Not only that. We have to stop seeing men as rapists and pedophiles, except when they really are. A man walking with a child, or helping a child he doesn’t know should not be an occasion for police intervention or suspicion. We have moved men to the sidelines of our society and replaced them with government. So, we have to get rid of government from our lives, and women have to stop expecting men to be women, but with balls.

This is a good idea, and it’s weird that no conservative has bought a leftist media outlet. Maybe it’s time. After all, the recent “anti-Obama” (i.e. honest) Newsweek cover article has doubled it’s usual sales: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/379630/20120831/newsweek-tina-brown-barack-obama-niall-ferguson.htm

The dinosaur media is, of course, spinning this as the topic being “controversial” and starting a “firestorm,” but as most people know, its popularity is due to the fact that, for once, the cover story actually appeals to readers.

[quote]Part of the problem, as I see it, is that these media properties are not generally good investments.[/quote]

Obama propaganda just doesn’t sell (as the declining ratings and readership of MSNBC and NYT attests). Maybe such investments are only not lucrative for regressives? After all, regressive Air America bombed, while Rush and Beck continue to soar. Maybe it’s . . . dare we say it, the consumers who drive demand and make the organization money?

Granted there are other issues with this theory, especially the rise of new media and the internet–I can’t remember the last time I bought either a newspaper or a magazine, but perhaps I might if they were worth reading.

    ugh, I actually wrote “it’s” for “its.” Shoot me now.

      98ZJUSMC in reply to Fuzzy. | September 1, 2012 at 12:25 pm

      it’s = it is. Correct contraction.

      No harm. No foul. Consistent, since you used can’t in the following paragraph.

    Neo in reply to Fuzzy. | September 1, 2012 at 3:36 pm

    Often forgotten, when CNN was formed by Ted Turner, there was endless jawboning about how Ted was building a “Right wing” news channel.
    Eventually, Ted went full Left (and married Jane Fonda) but CNN was never “Right wing.”

    It’s important to pay attention. George Soros is buying FaceBook stock. Even down over 50% since it’s IPO, FB’s current PE is still too high to make any financial sense, so there must be another reason.

This is certainly an interesting notion.

Part of the reason you don’t have the mega-rich buying Mushroom Media is they don’t know it, understand it, or like it. Hardly a surprise.

I also suspect they have very good analysts telling them the markets are not going to support the old models.

And markets are VASTLY interesting things. There is a feed-back loop at work with the core market for the NYT; New York City. A conservative NYT would die faster than the radical Leftist one will (though dying it is).

Even FOX has been confused by its own market. “Fair and balanced” is NOT “reliably, implacably Conservative”, and yet a lot of people I see criticize it for being what it sets out to be, rather than the “conservative NYT”.

I don’t think this is a matter of “taking over” as much as a matter of evolution. Dinosaurs are being exposed to their environment, and either will find a niche or die. Newer, more adaptive forms are coming up, and the best adapted will live and thrive. But, given the revolution brought on by the explosion of computer technology, nobody is going to make a lot of money in the coming media democracy.

And that is, paradoxically, a really good thing. It means nobody will have that kind of market share…or that kind of influence.

Why would you have to hire Journalism majors? Many if not most of the top names are just Dem operatives or non-college grads. Look at Matthews (Dem op, no journalism major)or Brian Williams (5 years of college and only 16 credits). On the other hand Greta–lawyer, not journalism–is one of the most successful TV personalities.

Afraid any smart, conservative billionaire would see buying NBC as a huge risk and probable loser-proposition. That said, having spent 4-decades in ‘the biz’, it sure would be fun going in to MSNBC, kicking butt, purging, sterilizing and watching Fast Eddie, Chrissy, Revrund Tawana & Larry cry like the punks they are. Might consider keeping Wretched Madcow as a Lib-Progressive ‘balance’ to the rock-ribbed cons I’d put in there. Rachel does have a semi-nimble brain that isn’t 100% Doofusenesss.

Bill: Discovered your fine site this a.m. from neoneocon’s place. Like it.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/149880/

The GOP Goes Alinsky On Obama by J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/08/31/the-gop-goes-alinsky-on-obama/?singlepage=true

The Leftist “media” must be included, as THEY are Alinsky’s voice from his grave.

If my memory serves me right, before Newsweek sold itself for $1.00 it turned down an offer by a conservative outlet because they feared that Newsweek would no longer be what it had been.

Senator Blutarsky | September 1, 2012 at 12:40 pm

Professor Jacobson is right that legacy media properties are generally poor investments.

The $1 price for Newsweek is a bit misleading, If you buy a share of stock you can lose no more than the purchase price, but if you buy all the equity in a money-losing enterprise, you can lose many multiples of the purchase price.

Moreover, given that the quality of the incumbent competition is so severely impaired by leftist bias, building alternatives rather than trying to fix incumbents looks all the wiser.

Consider how effectively blogs have countered MSM-driven narratives in the past week regarding Romney’s birth certificate quip and Clint Eastwood’s performance:

http://senatorjohnblutarsky.blogspot.com/2012/09/instapunditalthouse-2-msm-0.html

    JackRussellTerrierist in reply to Senator Blutarsky. | September 1, 2012 at 2:18 pm

    I think building a conservative news service from scratch would be more successful and productive than rehashing the remnants of some libtard rag operation. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Best to let them writhe in their death throes. The only exception would be a broadcast network. Re-branding NBC, for example, would be an instant ratings draw and thus would present the opportunity for a hugely effective conservative impact on the news industry and the public dialogue.

    The only print organization worth trying to take over would be AP. Heh. That would be fun to watch.

“Part of the problem, as I see it, is that these media properties are not generally good investments.”

Correct. It is also true that conservative businessmen are, well, conservative, and do not normally take risks in areas in which they lack experience or even instinct. The “media” world has been liberal for a long time. They’ve been able to build a “farm system” within academia. Young liberals are far more immersed in the media culture than others. This is their metier. There were a few pioneering figures in the 60s and 70s who recognized bias and conceived of “objective” networks and news services. Their dreams did not end well. For Koch to buy Newsweek or NBC is a huge investment and risk requiring operational experience. Murdoch had Roger Ailes, who had cut his teeth on one of those earlier failed ventures, Television News Service, or TVN, funded for a while by conservative businessman Joe Coors.

Good stuff and I agree with Prof J’s points.
If we look back the liberal bias we notice in media probably began when the Federal Government became involved with Education. At the very least it amplified the enterprise.
Its become circular really. Like a self feeding pump.
Liberal legislation…liberal school policies…liberal students…liberal colleges…liberal journalists.
Similar lets say to what Obama exhibits with his Life of Julia mindset.

College Insurrection is a good start. At the very least its an exposure to points of views students wont hear in any classrom…save for a few.

Also we need to consider…that economic conditions amplify things so far as what the public “wants”.
Solve the economic downturn and my guess is suddenly the liberal mindset will diminish somewhat.
MSM Jouranalists, for the most part write for themselves and other members of “the club” and I find them more irritating than persuasive.
Do we really think a Thomas Friedman lecture about the benefits on a non natural resource economy changes a typical voters thoughts?
Nah.
Just gives someone like Paul Krugman something to chuckle about as he looks over his $400 reading glasses while he reaches for the Lafite Rothschild he will never mention.

NC Mountain Girl | September 1, 2012 at 12:50 pm

I have met conservative journalism school grads. They were all press secretaries for Republican office holders. They can seldom get the entry level jobs in media companies that would prepare them to be editors and producers.

The reason conservative investors haven’t purchased media companies is probably that there is little or no return on the investment for either newspapers and magazines these days. Consider this. How much did you used to spend on media? I used to spend close to a grand a year on subscriptions. Now it’s about $60 for a local paper that doesn’t have a website and a magazine that contains no advertising. While on line content is a lot cheaper to get in front of people’s eyeballs it is also very hard to get readers to pay for on-line content. That leaves advertising as the only revenue stream. Our host can tell us about how hard it is to make a go of it with on-line advertising.

I think movies and TV content may be a better avenue to explore in changing the culture. Good family films clean up at the box office while several family friendly cable channels are doing very well. The secret is to let the story itself be the message.

The mainstream media being leftist is one thing, bad as it is, but it’s just one thing. It’s pretty obvious that 50+ years ago the left systematically targeted for takeover municipal governments nationwide, just about the entirety of academia (post-secondary), the K-12 education system (mainly through the teachers’ unions), Hollywood, and, yes, the MSM. Liberals now dominate all of these cultural resources and institutions. Righting them is one thing, but we need to examine how and why conservatives ceded them to the left in the first place.

Since I first became a Republican in my twenties back in the 1980s, I wondered why conservatives didn’t band together and start a conservative (or just non-liberal) Hollywood of their own.

Things are better now than they were then (“2016 Obama’s America” … “The Hope & The Change”) in terms of our side creating multimedia products, but most of the progress I would attribute to technological advances. And, of course, this has been offset to some degree by pop culture becoming more biased and shrill.

I absolutely agree that we have to get at the root of the problem: pop culture and entertainment. People know there are conservative news outlets available now. But a liberal pop culture surrounds them and seeps into their lives and way of thinking unconsciously.

Obama is the manifestation of the culmination of a powerful PC narrative that has been running through our pop culture for years now that has influenced millions of Americans … the “Magic Negro.” He doesn’t need any experience … his past associations are irrelevant … he doesn’t need to be vetted, all that matters is he have a beautiful voice and a dazzling smile, and, as Shelby Steele has pointed out, be unthreatening as male African-Americans go.

I think what bewilders people is that after four years … this is not a Hollywood ending. So, it must be Bush’s fault.

Why do conservatives spend a pound of cure struggling to get conservative elected without spending an ounce of prevention creating pop culture products?

LukeHandCool (who won’t come cheap when the conservative Hollywood opens shop and comes knocking on his door).

    herm2416 in reply to LukeHandCool. | September 1, 2012 at 2:27 pm

    I think what bewilders people is that after four years … this is not a Hollywood ending. So, it must be Bush’s fault.

    As usual, LHC, you give a succinct blow to the crooked MSM nail.

    Well done.

“Part of the problem, as I see it, is that these media properties are not generally good investments.”

That was the thought bouncing around my head as I was reading this. Buying something for 10 cents on the dollar only makes sense if it’s going to go back up, but not if it’s on it’s way to zero. Plus, why buy a dying brand, so when it fails, the other side can say, “See what you did?”

It’s an elusive critter, perhaps even mythical, but an objective news source is ideal. Report the facts and let the consumer supply the context and conclusion. I don’t want hard right or hard left news. The Marxists are happy with Obama’s run-around Congress, but screamed “BUSHITLER” at every action of W. I don’t want any President to rule in the manner Obama has. In short, having an outlet that is as far from center as MSNBC is not the answer.

Changing society is a slow process. We see an acceleration in leftist indoctrination because pop culture has been overrun for the past 100 years. Now that we’re headed in the direction of Marxism, the struggle isn’t so much a change in direction, but the speed at which we are traveling.

I’m confident that true Liberalism will win out in the end. When I was faced with starting a family, I decided that my approach would be to teach my kids *how* to think, not *what* to think. It was difficult and scary, but if the political and economic ideology I hold is superior to others, then I have to trust that it will stand up to scrutiny. So far, my kids have embraced what I believe to be true. The only thing scarier than an old liberal is a young conservative, an old professor of mine used to say. Well, then I’ve unleashed a couple of Frankensteins into society.

It is frustrating and often discouraging to watch Marxist thought (let’s call it what it is…it’s neither liberal nor progressive, it’s restrictive and regressive) trumpeted as the way to go, but I’m convinced that some people can only learn after crashing and burning. I hope that enough of us in this great country have seen enough of this Marxist experiment called the Obama administration and are ready to put it back on the shelf. I hope that enough of us have learned how to think and shed the arrogant, condescending instruction from the MSM as to what to think and will vote for freedom and common sense.

Murdoch once owned the Village Voice, but made no effort to change its politics.

For better or worse, a publication that abruptly turns away from its readers is likely to lose those readers along with the advertisers those readers attract. It’s just business, really.

Sorry, but I don’t agree with this post. No MSM can change how a person thinks. I’m left of center on social issues, and very right of center when it comes to fiscal, limited govt issues.

The problem more so is the liberals have defined conservatism a certain way, and the way it has been defined is not what it actually is. I went to my first tea party event in 2010, I was still a dem in the process of reregistering as an independent. I was stunned to see so many people at that even agree with me that the debt is a major issue, that the govt has gotten too big, obamacare was too intrusive. There was no discussion of social issues, it all revovled around fiscal, indiv liberty, consitutional issues, and that is what attracted me to their message, Sarah Palin is one person who made me understand what she calls “common sense consitutionalism” is. She doesn’t push her social issues on me, she convinces me to think, see her point of view by living it.

If you just use the MSM to spread your views, then in my view its no better than what the liberals do. I want both parties held to account when in power. As of now, the MSM is not bias, but propoganda, and as more people figure this out, they will get less audience, as it should be, as they try and figure this out and rectify it, they will get more audience back, if not, there is now an alternative, the Internet, no filters.

    logos in reply to alex. | September 1, 2012 at 6:06 pm

    “Sorry, but I don’t agree with this post. No MSM can change how a person thinks.”

    You’d better believe the MSM does shape and influence public opinion. My mother is 80 years old and does not use a computer. She repeats the lies of the MSM to me regularly because that is what she hears on CBSABCNBC – and simply tunes me out when I attempt to persuade her that Paul Ryan is not attempting to take away her social security/Medicare, for example.

    A younger person who is not politically engaged will be similarly influenced by the MSM-spun sound bites. That way, they don’t have to think for themselves – ala the Obambots of 2008.

We have to think in terms of decades. That is exactly how the liberal activists entrenched themselves into “education.”

Perhaps the Tea Party can apply lessons learned from the Organized Atheist’s & ACLU’s Lawfare strategy and apply them to Collages which are leftist political bias mills against Conservatives/Christianity/Judaism.

When it becomes too expensive it will dent their on campus activism.

Organized Empowerment of students who resist this liberal bias onslaught is another application of lessons learned from the liberals.

There are three major reasons this isn’t done. It’s true that they are not good PASSIVE investments as the Professor says, but the larger (and primary) reason is that it is a pain in the a** to change the culture of a small company much less a media empire like the NYT. How do you think all the liberal assistant editors, editors and journalists would react to a dictate to suddenly start being “fair and balanced” much less conservative? They’d bail and then you’d have to FIND good conservative talent to replace them. And conservatives (like Erick Erickson at REDState) would rather OWN their own company than simply write lines for a paycheck.

The second hurdle is that the image of the organization is BUILT on reputation goodwill of having LIBERAL management. Although Pat Robertson claimed that turning UPI around was too expensive (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3607) the fact is that the media threatened to cancel EVERY contract it had if he bought it. For some reason, that had no problem with Korean cultist Sung Yun Moon (Washington Times founder) doing the same. The REASON these big media brands are accepted is because they don’t get treated the same way conservative ones do. Look at FOX versus CBS’s Dan Rather controversy. The bigger media “PR” will immediately brand whatever media source is “taken over” as a polluted well. FOX and EIB (Limbaugh) succeed because they delivered a quality product to marginalized audience that the MSM thought was no threat. Drudge is similar. But a TAKE OVER of an existing brand carries with it an extremely difficult proposition of facing Alinsky tactics within and without the organization – making it tougher to pull off.

Finally, most of the conservatives who have this money don’t have a love for the media world and/or expertise in how it works. That is changing as PJTV, Breitbart and others slowly learn not just how to create quality media products, but learn how the distribution of it works. Even if conservative rich guys decide to take over a major media brand, they are often just not willing to make it their life for the next 20 years to handle all the political, financial and organizational pain it would take to make it successful. Just because you know how to steer away from the right risks in casino’s doesn’t mean you remotely understand how to make a media organization work.

The BRILLIANT idea (in my opinion) of the writer Brian is to slowly buy up the publicly traded stock by hundreds of thousands of conservatives slowly. THAT is a HUGE idea. I’m going to work on that immediately.

Some good news is that without complete saturation, major media must be a little cautious in their propaganda. When they broadcast lies, and are exposed, they lose market share and lose credibility.

When they claim “Ryan Lied”, it was easily refuted. Ryan said the plant was being lost, but that Obama showed up and claimed he would (probably) save it for 100 years, but it closed on schedule, fully in 2009. All they said was “that plant closed under Bush”. Even a Twitter shot could reveal the dishonesty.

But their next step is “well both sides lie equally”.

FOX is more conservative, but they try (too hard) to represent the lie AND the truth, and to generate controversy.

And they go for the sensationalism. To get the viewership, they have to play up the trial of baby killers and wife killers for hours. They have to get the most sensational (and crazy wrong) views on Fukushima. If it bleeds, it still leads.

New media is the place to be … can’t put new wine in old wineskins? Broadcast news doesn’t have the viewership just because they are broadcast .. mostly it is that they have established their brand for decades. Dominate new media with accuracy, and skewer the propaganda with video and truth … that will win the day.

This blog has been an example of that, keeping well funded and media supported Warren on the run and busy covering her tracks, as she keeps getting exposed by this annoying professor. 🙂

Blogs such as this are devastating the old media. Therein lies the future. I get my daily news from about 10 different blogs which I trust. I then go to the local legacy media sites to refute their propaganda. Drives the left mad, but I think it influences the unconvinced and the unknowing.

I attack the media on the ground of my choosing. Local news comment blogs across our state is a good way to defend and counter. But it is more fun perusing the twitter posts/pics and facebook pages of “journalists” for evidence of their bias and tweeting it to the world, including their “followers”. Quite embarrassing for them when you stick em with their own “unbiased” words.

Two comments:

1. “Part of the problem, as I see it, is that these media properties are not generally good investments.”
…then why has OBOZO crony socialist warren buffet recently invested 10’s of millions in (already leftist) newspaper companies, like Lee Enterprises?
2. “Additionally, it would be hard to change the culture at these places, since journalism schools churn out liberal foot soldiers…”
..there is one notable exception: Hillsdale College, which is not only an outstanding school firmly committed to American principles, it also has a very good journalism school, whose graduates know more about America, the US Constitution and many other relevant, important and useful things that others (a typical leftist propagandist masquerading as a “journalist” is totally ignorant of anything involving this country).

About 2005 a share of McClatchy stock was about $70. As of Friday that share was selling for $1.56. The irony is that a large part of their classified advertising was taken away by Craigslist. The national media not only was being beat at their own game, they were being beat by someone doing the same thing for free.

Take that and add the fact that they continually piss off 50% of their potential market their business plan leaves something to be desired. Also in most of the large mainstream media companies the people who run the business and the people who produce the product (writers, editors etc….) are separate. The Army Of Liberal Arts Majors will defend to the death their independence from the business side of the organization.

So you have a business that the owners have limited say in the final product, a business that cuts half of its market off and a business that has to compete with someone who can do the same thing better and for free and you do not have an attractive investment environment.

Someone above wrote “decades.” Don’t think we have decades. Get yourself strapped in, because the water’s gonna get choppy.

Not sure why we couldn’t start a Movement to purchase one particular media company. I haven’t looked at them, don’t watch them much, but does one have outstanding shares which could be purchased, one share by one person, each of us fellows in arms, until we have a controlling interest, and simply vote at a shareholders’ meeting to change the board? Who would then hire a new President, one truly conservative, and not like Fox News, which is actually moderate?

Whose per share price is low? With the least number of outstanding shares?

I don’t know; is McClatchy a media company with reach? Should we start pushing conservative folks to buy one or two shares?

    Juba Doobai! in reply to Karen Sacandy. | September 1, 2012 at 7:18 pm

    No, we ought to encourage Breitbart. That organization can grow into a megamedia to rival AP and others. Let the LSM die off. Build Breitbart by accumulating and organizing a lot of the Conservative blogosphere under its umbrella. Create a massive media organization that is truly Conservative that way.

There is already a liberal progressive scheme to do this… but not in a good way. They have been trying to find ways to silence conservative talk radio for decades. Now they know how and it has started in small markets. I currently live in the Wilmington NC area – I think we are something like #162 on the Arbitron market size ranking. We have/had two wildly successful talk radio stations here. The first is an AM station that broadcast the same programming on another station in Fayetteville. They are part of the Clear Channel network, two weeks ago, they dumped Glenn Beck for Geraldo Rivera. Last week they fired the local morning show host – replacement tbd. Another Clear Channel station in Asheville fired their local host a few months ago. But the most aggregious was our FM station “The Big Talker” that had two call numbers to cover the region. They were bought several months ago by a liberal from Philadelphia. About 6 weeks ago, they dumped almost the entire lineup: Neil Boortz, Clark Howard, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin are all gone – replaced by Michael Schmerconish and “America’s Radio News”. The only conservative programming we have left is just one local host – and he has noticably toned it down since this happened – and Rush Limbaugh.

I doubt Wilmington is the only place this is happening.

Too many people forget that MSNBC and NBC are owned by General Electric — which has sold out to Obama.

So if a GOP president is serious about taking back the MSM from malignant propagandists, then that president will have to punish GE: kill all the contracts and future business with them that you can, and bid them out elsewhere.

Any damage done to GE and its stockholders will pale to the damage GE has allowed to be done to our country with its corruption and propaganda.

The billionaire conservatives should fund starting charter schools – “The hand that rocks the cradle”. The teacher-unions will then be caught in a death spiral – they can’t become efficient (via layoffs) to compete economically, the message they’re selling is typically not what the customer wants, and their quality is not what the customer wants. They will go the way of the dodo.

Then the billionaires can simply fund research or fund chairs at conservative universities – a little money can go a LONG way, if spent in the right way. And there are a LOT of very good conservative people in the college system, who have been prevented from working at their capability-level due to their superiors disagreeing with their politics.

Or go buy a couple of universities, and just wholesale replace departments, one at a time.

Why don’t conservative billionaires buy legacy media outlets? Perhaps the best explanation is a bawdy story from the late Buddy Hackett.

A man began having severe problems with his manhood. It became discolored and painful. He went to his doctor, who diagnosed a rare and fatal venereal disease, and said the only cure was amputation.

The man decided he wanted a second opinion, so he sought out the leading manhood-doctor in the country, but he told him the same thing. So the man asked if there no outside chance. The doctor said a doctor in the Philippines had been working on experimental treatments, but he doubted they could work.

The man didn’t care and jumped the next flight to Manila, looked up the Filipino doctor and went to see him. “Doc, every other doctor says I must have it cut off immediately – is this true?”

“Oh, no, not at all!” the doctor replied. The man breathed a sigh of relief, and felt better than he had felt in days.

But the doctor continued, “You see, in 2-3 weeks, it fall off by itself!”

And this is why we don’t buy legacy media organs.

Trying to take over MSM operations, while a battle field victory is strategic folly. The MSM is a dying dinasaur – they just refuse to see it. I heard Mark Levin ponder last week why viewership for the convention was significantly down. Even Mark mus-understands.

I don’t know any conservative/neo-libertarian that gets their news from broadcast or even cable news programing. Yes, we still read the major publications, but with jaundiced eye. Furthermore, we know where to to virtually instantly to see a story that sounds incorrect factually splayed.

Why would a smart businessman buy a newspaper when s/he knows fewer and fewer people are buying its product? There are so many alternate, and free, sources available. Per Levin’s query, I had the convention on in the background (other than the major speeches) on C-Span – a raw feed without the ubiquitous and ever vacuous talking heads interrupting incessantly. I caught the speeches I missed via internet.

I don’t think viewership, or enthusiasm, is down; we are just becoming informed via sources not controlled, nor even monitored, by the old guard.

Since I was actually the editor of a newspaper in my distant past, kindly allow my comment. Running a news organization is hard work and extremely time-consuming. It’s like being married and owning a restaurant – one has two families constantly needing one’s undivided attention. Similarly the news biz gobbles up huge blocks of energy. Not so sure the Koch brothers, say, have the available time required to make a news outlet functional, let alone successful and profitable.

Currently conservatives have at least Breitbart, Drudge and PJ Media. None are perfect for all are far better than any of the so-called LSM. Concentrate on financially supporting one or more of them -or their wannabes – and do not support the LSM, and the problem will be solving itself sooner than you think.

There are still honest news professionals out there. Don Serbur, for one.