A Private Party

Early in the primaries, things were just peachy-keen for Dean and his Deaniacs. They had money, they had verve, they had vision, they had message and voice.

And they had positive media coverage.

But over in the blogosphere, things looked a little different. Many remarked that Dean was a nutcase and cited some of his lesser-covered statements. It was widely rumoured that the Bush team dearly hoped Dean would win. Conservative bloggers openly cheered Dean on.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. The media turned on Dean. He no longer got a pass for saying he kind of wonderfully stupid, unelectable thing that had won him ironic conservative support early in his campaign. A virtual media feeding frenzy ensued.

When the dust settled things looked quite different. The press had stopped pointing out Kerry's incessant "I was in Vietnam!" posturing and was portraying him as a bona-fide three-dimensional candidate with gravitas.

What changed? I wondered.

From The New York Times:

Some of Franken's recent behind-the-scenes actions are at least as interesting as his public performances and show the depth of his seriousness. Last fall, when Dean seemed the inevitable nominee before a single primary vote had been cast, Franken was troubled that John Kerry was being written off. ''I liked Dean, but I also think Kerry is just a really smart, capable man,'' he told me. ''I'd noticed that he was very good in a small gathering, so I thought, What if I invite some opinion makers over to hear him?'' On Dec. 4, an impressive collection of the media elite and assorted other notables -- Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Jim Kelly of Time, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, Jacob Weisberg of Slate and others, including, as eminence grise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- responded to his call and had a little powwow with Kerry at the Upper West Side apartment of Franken and his wife, Franni.

''The whole thing was odd, I would say, because people didn't know why they were there,'' Kelly said. ''But I think the idea was to put John Kerry into the belly of the beast. It may have been the actual beginning of the new approach he took -- 'I'm going to stay in this room and take every question you throw at me.''' Alterman grilled Kerry on his vote on Iraq, and he gave a long, tortured answer. Then he was asked about it a second time. ''By the third go-round, the answer was getting shorter and more relevant,'' Kelly said.

How nice. The people who write the news you will read take turns prepping a particular candidate on what questions they will ask him, and coaching him on what sort of answers he should respond with.

''It was a really interesting event,'' Alter said. ''A lot of these people hadn't actually met Kerry before. Al wanted them to get to know him. It was an example of him playing a sort of intermediary role in the nexus of politics, media and entertainment.''

Noted: Such a nexus exists, and revolves around the left.

The next time Franken saw Kerry was at the rally in Nashua, seven weeks later. Things had changed significantly; Kerry was considered a new and improved candidate and now looked almost unbeatable. The senator took Franken aside, and they talked for a few minutes. ''I told him I'm taking credit for the turnaround,'' Franken told me. ''He said, 'I knew you would.'''

A small private party. A losing candidate. The "media elite".

And a changed storyline emerges in the news you consume.

Creating "Air America"

There's also another interesting discussion in the article about "Air America", the radio network which powerful liberals are trying to create to counter the voice conservatives have on radio and op-ed columns.

It's interesting: Rush Limbaugh, like him or not, is a market-driven phenomenon. He wasn't funded, or backed, or "created" by some people who were attempting to gain control of your federal government. His show was funded by people advertising gold coins and anti-itch powder.

In this, you might say he earned his fame the old-fashioned way: by entertaining people. He's an entertainer, and admits it openly. During the Clinton years, when a huge number of disaffected conservatives suspected they weren't being told the whole truth by the White House and media, Rush gained marketshare by purporting to fill in the missing gaps. People were interested and tuned in.

In short, it was the audience, the ratings, which selected and drove the conservative content within the show.

Now let's compare this with how "Air America" is being created:

Forty floors above Midtown Manhattan, Mark Walsh, the C.E.O. of Air America, stands in a conference room whose walls are covered with index cards that say things like ''Press Secretary for Terrorists'' and ''Corporate Welfare Pledge Drive'' -- comedy bits in the making. He draws a bell curve on a marker board, then makes lines dividing his curve into sections. The sections on the far left and far right are almost flat, but as you approach the middle, both sides grow. He draws an oval around the swollen area to the left of center. ''I think Al and voices like Al's really blend in here,'' he said. ''I think Michael Moore, for example, is a very talented writer and performer, but a lot of what he says starts to go out on the curve -- much like Michael Savage, who is pretty far out on the other side. Everybody is fighting over a very skinny slice of the independents, because those are the people who are persuadable.''

The chart is Walsh's way of characterizing the electorate/radio audience. Air America, he said, intends to tilt leftward, but not too far.

Note how backward this process is: Normally, an entertainment venture goes after the largest audience: ratings is the game, and the more the better. Instead, Air America is carefully crafting it's "message" to attract and change the political leanings of a "skinny slice" of the population.

Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer who used politics to get ratings. These people are politicians who want to use entertainment to gain power.

Think I'm kidding? Check out the connections! Who is this guy, Walsh, the CEO at the blackboard, crafting the message in question?

The network has no official ties to the Democratic Party, but there are unofficial ties. Air America's C.E.O., Mark Walsh, is friends with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe. John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton White House, will offer advice and, through his think tank, the Center for American Progress, an information pool. ''We'll be a resource for them, much the same way that the Heritage Foundation provides stuff that right-wing talkers use,'' Podesta said.

No, there's a huge difference: The Heritage Foundation sits afar, producing its material. Conservative pundits cite it when they feel it's accurate and exposes some overlooked point. The President of Heritage doesn't actually sit down with the talking head and tell him what to say; they don't hold a staff position at the radio station, much less dictate the content an entire network of stations.

And what was Walsh, Air America CEO and friend of the DNC chairman, doing before this venture?

It was initially spearheaded by the Chicago investors Sheldon and Anita Drobny... It languished for months until David Goodfriend, a former Clinton White House staff member, and Evan Cohen, an entrepreneur who at the time was developing a pan-Asian radio network, saw an opportunity and pulled together a group of investors to resuscitate the project. They brought in Walsh, who had been volunteering for Kerry's presidential campaign.

Ah! Walsh was promoting John Kerry!

And before that, Walsh was telling kids what to think via MTV:

Walsh, who is 49 with gray hair and chiseled features, was at HBO in the early 1980's, persuading people to do the unthinkable and pay for TV programming; next he was with AOL in its early days. Those two companies succeeded, he said, because they hit their respective media with a new idea at just the right time. ''And I think the timing today is just right for a progressive media business aimed at an audience that's underserved.''

Perhaps. But it's clear this approach is, first and foremost, about politics.

Talking heads like Limbaugh are picked up at an AM station's discretion. Limbaugh, Hannity, or whoever doesn't tell the station what content to carry. Instead control is decentralized, according to the tastes and preferences of station owners and what works in the market.

Question: So why, then, build a "radio network", long thought to be a dead idea? Answer: So you don't have to compete head-to-head with conservative voices. So you can control the entire format of the station; every single word it says.

Again, think I'm kidding?

Jon Sinton, an Atlanta radio executive, has been with the project from the beginning. After having failed to attract an audience in Atlanta for the liberal host Mike Malloy, who was sandwiched between a sports show and Mexican programming, and seeing Jim Hightower languish between Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, Sinton became a believer in ''formatic purity.'' ... ''So I argued for a network situation, where we would never have to worry about programming conflicts.''

Don't ya just hate it when station owners get to make choices like that? These people are profoundly authoritarian.

Top-down, money from people you don't know, telling you a message crafted to get you to support people who want to control your government; people who openly state they want to use the state in a way which vastly enlarges its power.

Unlike the economy, power is a zero-sum game.

Remember that before you give yours up.

It's very hard to get it back later.