It's news to me that the Right has any sexy and cool scholars and journalists on their side at all. (Justin Raimondo tries, but he tries too hard.) In any case, the print media -- especially print journals of opinions -- are moribund, be they on the left or the right or anywhere else. I can't think of any conservative magazine that I want to _buy_ and read regularly; come to think of it, I don't sub to any left-wing magazine either -- I just read some of them on the Net or in the libraries (I still buy more books than I should). The most promising media of mass communication for activists are radio, the Net, and video because of comparatively cheaper production costs (see below); the print media on the left will have their roles to play, most importantly providing continuing education of organic intellectuals and offering fora for political debates, but they can never be "populist" media today in a way that radio, etc. can be (or in a way that the print media used to be about a century ago).
***** Seizing the Moment Radio and the Internet offer affordable routes to new audiences DAVID BARSAMIAN
...Radio provides a tremendous opening; in fact, it's so economical that it defies belief. For example, my weekly one-hour program costs me $100 for satellite time; that's all it costs to rent one hour on the public radio satellite for access to hundreds of stations. When I first explored this, I thought, "It's out of the question, I don't have money." I thought it might be thousands, like for TV. But it's not. Radio remains an area of enormous possibility.
I've also learned from National Public Radio, which controls the public radio satellite, that a 24/7 channel is available for 365 days a year for $8200. That's like six trips to Safeway, or, if you have an SUV, a tank of gas. But no one is stepping forward yet to seize this opportunity....
Radio is a tremendously powerful and intimate vehicle. Edward Said calls it the oppositional vehicle, because visual images steal our imagination. TV sort of paralyzes our thoughts, while radio allows the mind to absorb subtle and not so subtle messages.
Around 1910 there was a weekly magazine in this country called Appeal to Reason. Can anyone guess its paid circulation? 700,000, with a readership of four million. Think about that, and about the US population in 1910. What were the conditions then, and what are the conditions now? In particular, why are our print media so enfeebled and impoverished? The Nation is the premier Left magazine, and its circulation is 100,000; The Progressive has 30,000, Z magazine has 20,000. If you add up the circulation of our entire print media today, we don't even approach a quarter of what Appeal To Reason had 90 years ago. And you don't have to go back 90 years. Just go back to George Seldes, the legendary radical journalist. He had a wonderful newsletter call In Fact. When he stopped publishing in 1947, it had 150,000 paid subscribers.
We need to recreate that, perhaps not in the same forms, but in the forms that have been alluded to by others. I'm firmly committed to electronic media. I don't want to dis my print brothers and sisters, but tapes, CD's, and videos are where it's at right now. And that's where it's going to grow exponentially.
In short, enormous possibilities exist, and I'm inspired to find a new generation of media activists surging forward, exploring and developing indy media centers, the Internet, and Websites. That's the future....
<http://www.towardfreedom.com/2001/jan01/radio.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>