I Want My Al TV

By Karen Tumulty Sunday, June 22, 2003
    • With its ornate chandelier, Italian tile floor and antique gilded mirror, the little salon tucked just off the Senate floor looks like a spot designed for polite conversation. But the dialogue was anything but polite when media magnate Rupert Murdoch lunched there in early June with Democratic Senators. The session was supposed to be a private discussion of the effects that looser media-ownership rules would have on consolidation and competition. Instead, the Democrats spent an hour venting about Murdoch's enormously successful Fox News Channel. They complained that the cable network, whose slogan is "fair and balanced," shuts out and even mocks anything but right-wing views. California's Barbara Boxer told Murdoch his network's only balance is between the right and the far right, and suggested a new tag line: "Fox News: the right slant."

    With Fox's comfortable dominance in the high-pitched world of cable, it's easy to forget that in the mid-1980s it was the right that felt abused and ignored on the airwaves. In 1985, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms launched a campaign to get 1 million conservatives to buy 20 shares of stock in CBS each and "become Dan Rather's boss." Conservatives still argue — garnering huge and sympathetic audiences in the process — that the traditional media giants lean left. But these days, that familiar spiel is done more for rhetorical effect. Conservatives know their power in talk radio, cable television and publishing, and they exult in it. Democratic Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota recently commissioned a study of a week's worth of programming by the nation's 44 top-rated radio stations and found they broadcast 312 hours of conservative talk programming, compared with 5 hours of liberal shows. And with conservative authors staked out atop the nonfiction best-seller lists, the country's two largest publishers, Random House and Penguin Group, have added conservative imprints to their roster.


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    All these outlets combined still reach only a smallish slice of the population, but it's a motivated and committed slice — that all-important group of people who actually vote. They're the ones who helped put the Republicans in power in the White House and in both houses of Congress. That's why Democrats are increasingly eager to find a microphone of their own. As first reported by TIME's website last week, former Vice President Al Gore has been exploring the idea of creating a cable-television network, as well as helping Chicago venture capitalists Sheldon and Anita Drobny start a liberal talk-radio network.

    The initial challenge is not political but economic. Gore and Friends have to convince potential backers that there's a market. Said a Hollywood source familiar with Gore's original TV proposal: "When it first came around, people were, like, 'How is this thing going to make money?' These are Democrats, but they're business people first." That's why Gore and his partner Joel Hyatt, who co-founded a nationwide chain of storefront legal clinics, have refined their proposal to be less ideological and more entertaining. It would not be a traditional news network, says a person familiar with their plan, but "something totally different in concept and format." Both Gore and Hyatt declined to be interviewed.

    Whether there really is a market for entertaining liberal media is a question mark. A few liberals have tried to make a go of talk radio and television, but none have developed anything close to the following of radio's Rush Limbaugh and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. Perhaps it's because liberals are too earnest. But even as gifted a gabber as former New York Governor Mario Cuomo failed as a talk-show host because his program was, in a word, boring.

    Many Democrats are convinced, however, that if someone can build a network to showcase their point of view, the ratings will come. As evidence of an appetite for liberal media, they point to the fact that Hillary Clinton's just-released memoir is on track to becoming the fastest-selling nonfiction work of all time.

    But others argue that all the hand wringing over the lack of a liberal alternative to conservative media misses the left's real problem: a lack of new and coherent ideas. That's why key figures from the Clinton White House, led by former chief of staff John Podesta, are launching a new liberal think tank to rival such conservative intellectual bastions as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

    It's all part of what Hillary Clinton might call a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. But there's a long way to go. It took conservatives 30 years — from Barry Goldwater's call to action in 1964, to Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House in 1994--to put all the pieces in place. In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch is not likely to be accepting any more lunch invitations from the Democrats.