Check out this piece on Huffpo, “Air America’s ABC Blacklist,” co-written by Josh Silver (Executive Director of Free Press) and Robert McChesney (co-founder of Free Press)
This week 90 major corporations demanded that their ads be pulled from radio stations that run Air America programming, “demonstrating the fundamental challenge facing everyone working to promote critical journalism and a vibrant free press.”
Why is this happening?
While “liberal” Air America clearly favors big D Democrats, unlike virtually all other programming on commercial radio and television, it gives airtime to reports that are critical of corporations and the powerful politicians they keep in Washington.
This is a well-written article that serves as a good introduction to a deeply-disturbing all-pervasive issue. The U.S. will never have social or political health unless we figure out this huge problem: How do we keep big corporate dollars from choking off diverse perspectives in major media outlets?
We see here the real reason why those corporations choose to advertise on progressive radio stations. Usually, the main purpose of advertising is to sell products and services to a particular audience: in the case of progressive radio stations, the audience is presumably big D democrats. Thus, if advertisers want to reach that audience, then they advertise on those stations, and if they don't like the results they can take their ad money elsewhere.
However, by trying to gerrymander the programming on those radio stations — i.e., by trying to remove Air America programming — the corporations would drive away many of the listeners that are attracted to that radio station because it features such programming. From the point of view of advertisers, this would obviously be counter-productive to the goal of selling products and services to those listeners. But if the main purpose of their advertising is not to sell products and services to those listeners, but to create political leverage over their corporate critics, then it would make a lot of sense for corporations to try to gerrymander the programming while simultaneously continuing to advertise on those stations. They would not care about driving away listeners, because selling products and services to those listeners wasn't their goal in the first place.