What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the libertarian billionaires like the Kochs, understand the power of media.
Those of great wealth aligned with the left in America, however, have always largely ignored media, probably because they grew up in an America with the Fairness Doctrine and before the 1996 Telecommunications Act and they always just assumed that "the truth will eventually be known."
But investing in political media can produce both a huge return on investment, and can transform the politics of the nation.
That's certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable.
Brit Hume noted, in a 1999 interview with PBS: "This operation loses money. It doesn't lose nearly as much as it did at first, and it's -- well, it's hit all its projections in terms of, you know, turning a profit, but it's -- it will lose money now, and we expect for a couple more years. I think it's losing about $80 million to $90 million a year."
But that loss wasn't viewed by these right-wing billionaires as a "loss" -- rather, it was an investment.
It's what Reverend Moon believed, as his Washington Times newspaper lost hundreds of millions of dollars but spread right-wing perspectives that influenced the nation. It's how the Koch brothers have referred to the hundreds of millions they shower on right-wing politicians and causes. And it's what the people who started Air America Radio believed, although they couldn't get big funders to understand the stakes.
While Rupert Murdoch lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Air America's bankruptcy was for $14 million) in its first few years, Murdoch hung on and kept pouring in the cash. And it put George W. Bush into the White House, according to several independent analyses.
As Richard Morin wrote for the Washington Post back in 2006, asking rhetorically, "Does President Bush owe his controversial win in 2000 to Fox cable television news?"
The answer was an emphatic "yes!" according to academics who did exhaustive research into what they called "the Fox Effect."
As Morin reported:
"'Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect,' said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely [sic] and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.
"In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox Effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush -- clearly a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes."
The analysis looked at the vote from 1996 to 2004 in 9,256 American cities and towns where Fox was available on basic cable.
"They found," reports Morin, "clear evidence of a Fox Effect among non-Republicans in the presidential and senate races, even after controlling for other factors including vote trends in similar nearby towns without access to Fox."
The researchers added, Morin wrote, that, "[T]he Fox effect seems to [be] permanent and may be increasing." And that was in 2006.
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