When the left gets excited about an obscure communications bill passing in Congress, take that as a warning to sit straight, tune in immediately and start investigating.
When our friends on the left complain that Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Beck and Mr. Hannity are on the air too much — is that like kvetching that a girl is too beautiful and should splash mud on her face to give her competition a chance?
The left has few and weak voices on talk radio because of the vacuity of the liberal message. Democrats, in the immortal word of Larry Elder, are victocrats.
They believe nearly every American is a victim, except for all conservatives and especially all wealthy.
The left’s near invisibility is called competition, boys.
There is a three-word reason only one liberal station exists in all of Los Angeles, 1150AM, one of the most liberal metropolitan areas on the planet:
Paucity of message.
Lest that seem dismissively slick, don’t take my word. Listen to 1150’s slender lineup, which cannot gain traction. The audience would fit in the backseat of my car any 12-hour day between 3 a.m. and 3 p.m., their talk programming.
Within 30 minutes of the starting times for the four regular weekday hosts, at 3 a.m., 6, 9 and 12, you have heard the full range of their interests and commentary. They are as different as identical twins.
How many times can you push and squeeze and tuck “victim” and “we wuz robbed” into a sentence? It is not unlike riding on a sped-up ferris wheel for 12 hours. Either you or the ground soon becomes seasick.
I only have found information on the new law passed on the weekend at left-wing websites. Before sharing a sampling from the tellingly named site reclaimthemedia.org, you should know that their website allies include the equally curiously named Center for Media Justice and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center.
“Peace and Justice” is a main mantra of the left, and a cue for sensible Americans to start digging.
Here is reclaimthemedia’s report:
With the clock ticking toward the end of this year's Congress, the Senate on Saturday passed a new law which will enable community groups, churches and schools across the country to establish new non-commercial, low-power FM radio stations in their cities and towns.
The Local Community Radio Act, which will allow the FCC to issue possibly thousands of new noncommercial LPFM radio licenses, earned broad, bipartisan support after some ten years of organizing by grassroots media democracy advocates from coast to coast. Backers of the bill included a stupefying range of civil rights groups, religious organizations, musicians, unions and garage-bound radio dreamers around the country.
Washington State elected officials played a pivotal role in passing the bill into law; Senator Maria Cantwell championed the bill in the Senate, and House cosponsors included Washington Rep. Jay Inslee.
“This is a huge win for communities across the northwest and across the country who have been pining for more and better local radio, more support for local music and more diversity on the airwaves,” said Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media, a Seattle-based media justice organization which has worked alongside many other advocacy groups since 2002 to expand community access to media, including LPFM.
From a Philadelphia site:
“A town without a community radio station is like a town without a library,” said Pete Tridish of the Prometheus Radio Project, the group which has led the fight to expand community radio for ten years.
And this from the very left Daily Kos:
Anyone tracking the rise of radio personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage understands the primary political significance of gaining access to spectrum. With the opening of the airwaves to LPFM stations, progressives can gain a small but not insignificant spot on the radio dial. The challenge now is to organize local groups to gain access to licenses. Watch Prometheus Radio Project to learn more on this.
This bill would not have passed without the tireless work of a small, but dedicated corps of radio activists who faced down one of the most powerful corporate lobbies in Washington — the National Association of Broadcasters and — after ten years of pushing and broad-based organizing —got them to yield on Friday.
With the corporate lobby out of the way, the bill passed both the House and the Senate in little more than 24 hours.
Stay tuned because this is the most interesting radio on the left has been for awhile.
