----- Original Message -----
From: Yoshie
> 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?
Television-- people get a lot of information that way, so it naturally cuts the audience for print media. And try watching daytime television-- lots of left cultural discussion, from gays and transexuals on Donahue back in the 1970s long before most of the left got "queer-friendly." I just saw some Freepers ranting about Susan Sarandon being on "The View" talking about her anti-war and anti-Bush views. The gender gap in politics is partly reinforced by the media gap-- and I am always, well not surprised, but interested that commentators on the media and news so systematically ignore and discount daytime television.
>The Nation is the premier Left magazine, and its
> circulation is 100,000;
How about union publications which go out to millions of people each month? UAW's Solidarity is pretty decent and some others are pretty good.
And the whole array of membership based groups, from enviro to feminist to human rights groups, send out newsletters and updates and even mass fundraising letters that contain quite a bit of progressive information.
Even without the Internet, which is adding a cascade of info for left-leaning folks to read, I would bet that the average progressive person reads more pages of PRINT about progressive issues each month than in the imagined Golden Age of the turn of the century.
I generally think the whole media concentration argument is full of crap as an explanation of left decline. Write something interesting and people will end up reading it. THE ONION is a great example, where their best stuff ends up getting read and forwarded so consistently that it's hard to argue that its access, not content, which is the problem.
-- Nathan Newman