A self-fulfilling prophecy which has kept progressive and radical voices marginalized for many decades. If you can get enough leftists to believe that they are few in number and their views are unpopular...
The facts are that there is a tremendous interest out there in our ideas. We really aren't being ambitious enough, if you ask me. It also doesn't help when lefties like Woj keep harping about how unpopular our ideas are.
Progressive media is doing well right now. I can't think of anybody I know who has cut back on what they are doing because of lack of interest. Perhaps a few magazines have gone under because of the situation in the industry with distro and shifts in readership, but all signs point to a growing interest in our ideas.
My friend Tom Wheeler, who is on this list, is busy publishing Alternative Press Review, which does well on the newstands. He's gearing up to do another magazine. I'm working on the next issue of my magazine and am making plans to publish four issues this year. I get subscription requests constantly for a magazine which has only published once in the past five years. Lately we've been getting dozens of requests for Practical Anarchy from prisoners.
How many people is Doug reaching with his radio show? B. with his podcast? Snit with her blog? How about Indymedia websites? Pacifica and Democracy Now? All of those liberal websites and all of those radical news sites? Have you seen how many books AK Press publishes and distributes these days? Other left presses are coming out with new titles constantly. New infoshops and bookstores are opening up all over the place (including new ones in Arizona and Milwaukee).
The last time we were keeping stats for Infoshop, back in late 2004, the website was getting 180,000 visitors and over 7 million hits per month. I'm sure that we still get that level of traffic, if not more.
I'm willing to bet that progressive media in the U.S. is reaching more people than we have since the early 20th century, when the labor and radical press were reaching a higher percentage of the population.
Doug points to the situation with The Nation, whose circulation just exploded since 2000. That magazine is now more "mainstream" than "alternative."
I'm supposed to be a librarian, but I find myself working full time as a media activist. These days I'm more worried about finding money to pay writers than I am about a lack of people reading our website. Like yesterday, when some guy contacted me about publishing an article about water privatization in El Salvador. I'd love to publish the article, but our project has little money right now. That article will probably get published by one of the liberal news sites which has more money. On the other hand, thanks to some European comrades, we did find some money to pay for some investigative reporting in New Orleans this month and next.
Self-censorship? Got to deal with that constantly. You can get away with saying many things in the U.S., but there are many complications which enforce self-censorship. Like how I have to be careful that nobody on Infoshop's boards threatens a public official. We don't want another visit from the FBI like last year. Or you have to be careful about infringing on copyrights (fuck you Salon.com) or printing stuff about corporations. One new worry involves closing open discussion about activists who currently face legal threats.
Chuck