I always enjoy reading right leaning articles that liberals control the media. This past fall was my first insight into the fact that NPR is a horrible entity espousing leftist-hate and should be taken off the air (thanks for opening my eyes you conservative types!). I guess reporting news about liberal things like the state of affairs in Iraq or US casulaties is not fair and or balanced. Where are the stories about the flowers and opressed running into the streets with open arms? Oh that didn't happen?
So I guess I was suprised when I was listening to my local listener supported radio station (wxpn, Philadelphia) and hear that one of the segments was brought to me by Wal-mart. At first I thought they had completely misunderstood their target audience, and then I thought back to all the petitions and controversy to get them removed as a sponsor of Good Morning America's Only In America. From my experiences Philadelphia is not a big Wal-Mart area, in fact the only one I know of is well outside of the city (476).
And then it got worse.
Shortly after the Wal-mart sponsored segment was an advertisement for
progressforamerica.org. It was cryptic in that it explained very little, except something along the lines of 'let's help fix our country' or something similarly vague and clouded by a progressive facade. Upon viewing the site and reading a little more about the groups purpose, you come across this bullet point, "Setting the record straight about liberal groups like Moveon.org, AARP & the unions".
I find the conundrum perplexing that on one side you have conservative idealists attacking NPR and wanting to take it down, and at the same time you find them advertising and pushing their agenda via the same resource they want shut down. While XPN is not purely public radio, it does run NPR updates throughout the day and has that PBS strategy of being listerner/viewer supported, removing the reliance on industry/big business ad influence (Infinity and Clear Channel are paying their salaries). While scratching my head at this love-hate relationship I realize the the real discussion needs to be the fact that groups like Wal-Mart and PFA are coming into markets most of us previously believed were immune from right-spin. The sanctity of my radio has been corrupted. Is the sacred 'undecided voter' a public radio listener? While I would like the believe that these two groups grossly misunderstood their audience, clearly they believe there is a benefit to this strategy, because otherwise you have to believe that two anti-union groups both entered the forray coincidentally and accidentally at the same time. Is this a sign of what is to come? Is the strategy to now go after the opposing camp and pick off one or two voters at a time at any financial cost? Do we see more love-hate relationships along the lines of the non-existant 527 controversy?
I can't wait for Halliburton to censor sponsor my news.