Turning the Tables

You know how right wing media spent the last four years preaching about how horrible crime, immigration, and the US economy are, when in reality, according to the The Economist, our economy is the envy of the world? Well, tighten your chinstrap—there’s whiplash ahead.

FNC, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, Salem radio stations, numerous bro-casts like Joe Rogan’s, Tucker Carlson’s YouTube channel, and so many other right-wing outlets, podcasts, social media trolls (led by Billionaire-in-Chief, Elon Musk), and too many websites to count, are all about to proclaim the unprecedented success of the American economy…wait for it…thanks to Donald Trump.

Joe Biden’s was a transformational presidency. He repaired infrastructure and put money into chip-building. Crime fell, as did illegal border crossings. Inflation normalized (although costs of goods remained stubbornly high), and wages rose for the first time since Ronald Reagan. But right-wing media has the biggest “share-of-voice,” and disparaged Biden’s accomplishments.

It’s ironic that Democratic and liberal leaders alike are suddenly aghast at how little audience mainstream and left-leaning media garner.

It’s not as though they weren’t warned.

I have no interest in self-aggrandizement. In actual fact, I failed. I turned out to be a modern-day Casandra. Still, I hope the following story relates the importance of controlling the narrative.

I was worried in 2003. As a radio programming consultant, I had watched Rush Limbaugh save the AM band with Conservative Talk. Owners of then nearly worthless AM properties that had lost their music programming to the higher-fidelity FM band, were in a panic. Talk was a panacea. Although Limbaugh was demonstrably un-telegenic and failed to gain a foothold on TV, a Republican political operative named Roger Ailes noticed the electoral impact Talk Radio had, and, being a maven of television, went to Newscorp owner, Rupert Murdoch, an Aussie who became an American citizen in order to buy up big-market TV stations and woo the NFL away from the traditional Big Three broadcast networks to his nascent FOX television network. He already had The X-Files, and the Simpsons. Football would ice the cake.

Murdoch was flush with cash in October of 1996 when he launched the Fox News Channel. It lost $300M in its first three years, before turning the consistently huge profit it does now.

I barnstormed the nation in 2003, raising money for Air America Radio, a 24/7 progressive talk radio network. I talked to a lot of rich liberals, but unfortunately, as I like to kid, none of them had any money. Some, like Norman Lear and Rob Reiner understood, and invested a few hundred thousand dollars. Of the people I pitched, only a handful really had the wherewithal put up the tens of millions of dollars we would need to gain stability, make a profit, and allow us to spread the content to other media like television.

George Soros had that kind of money, but only put up a token amount. Al Franken and I tried to get him to take a larger role. We cajoled, unsuccessfully, and my wife, Laura, tried a more serious tack, using audience stats, hoping they would move him. They didn’t.

We went to venture funds, but none had the appetite for risk that Murdoch did. Our argument was a straightforward business proposition. Murdoch had jumped in with both feet, and held on as he lost money for a few years, before the tide turned. He had created an opportunity for voices from the other side.

We got the network started, but were turning the Coke machine upside-down to make payroll.

Jon Sinton and Rachel Maddow, Christmas 2005

We limped along, and Progressive Talk Radio failed to launch. Ultimately, Al became the junior senator from Minnesota, and our other star, Rachel Maddow, made the leap to cable. MSNBC repurposed our playbook, but cable alone wasn’t enough then or now. It’s the large array of content providers on the large array of platforms, both legacy and digital, that owns the day.

The media, no matter who owns it, has power. This from The New Republic: “If someone moved to America from Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? You would know that she is a very stupid person. You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you. Ask the same Mongolia question about Trump? [You’ll learn that] he’s been the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years, that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is ‘doing it all for you.’”

Very soon, the tables will turn, and the right-wing media ecosphere will rally around Donald J. Trump’s greatness, highlighting his economic prowess in so quickly reversing that awful Biden Economy.

Say what you will, the Republicans have the media environment figured out, and the Democrats do not.

©2025 Jon Sinton