SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: Fox News critique goes directly to living rooms

"What people have to realize [is] that going to see 'Fahrenheit 9/11' doesn't mean that you've participated in social change," said Don Hazen, executive director of San Francisco-based progressive news site AlterNet, which co- hosted an early screening of "Outfoxed" Friday in San Francisco; Greenwald is a board member of AlterNet's parent organization, the Independent Media Institute.


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I so disagree! The dominance of Republican party politics in America is all about the corporate culture, and nothing is going to influence corporate culture in America more directly than the box office. That's why, when Air America Radio came on the air, the right wing attacks focused not on the quality of its content, but on the idea that it was doomed to failure. When employees at Air America were paid one day late during one pay period, the "story" that they were having problems making payroll was repeated all over, and is still reverberating two months later. When A.A.R. stopped payment on a check to an affiliate whom they claim tried to swindle them, that was reported (misleadingly) as "a bounced check", and repeated often enough that eventually it morphed into a plural: "problems with bounced checks to affiliates." When the ratings came back, and Air America was beating Rush Limbaugh's station in New York-- especially among the coveted 18 to 35 demographic-- O'Reilly first claimed that the Arbitron ratings were a lie personally cooked up by Al Franken (whom, in typical "no-spin" fashion, he compared to Goebbels). When that position became untenable, O'Reilly brought an "expert" onto his show to repeat the "bounced checks" stories one more time, and to explain how Air America's success was a "bump" brought about by all the free positive publicity Air America recieved in the liberal media.

Note the contradiction. Even as he insists that the liberal point of view is doomed to failure in the information marketplace, O'Reilly also likes to insist that the information marketplace is dominated by the liberal point of view! In his owm mind, it probably makes some kind of sense.

Believe it or not, it's a lie. Ever since Air America Radio has gone on the air, I've had a Google news alert in place. This means that just about every time Air America Radio is mentioned on a website, I get an email with a link-- and let me tell you, the coverage of Air America radio, especially before the ratings started coming in, has been starkly, relentlessly, almost monolithically negative. For a while, I was beginning to think I was the only person out there who loved it.

Air America Radio, Fahrenheit 9/11 in the cineplex, and the Outfoxed parties in people's homes are breaking the right-wing corporate stranglehold on the media that the Right has used to create the illusion that liberalism is "not mainstream". This is the myth that President Butch likes to evoke at every stump speech. More Americans voted Democratic than Republican in the last three presidential elections. You'd think that being the majority would at least qualify us for a part of the mainstream.