Carolyn Kay Speaks.

You listen (from an e-mail she sent out yesterday; her comments are in bold):

Group Plans to Provide Investigative Journalism
As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap. Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets. The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

What do you want to bet that it will be mostly Democrats and friends of Democrats “investigated” by this group? And why is it that progressives won’t fund something similar?

Rush and his clones own the radio airwaves, and FOX exists on TV, because a concerted well-planned and well-funded effort was put into place by American conservatives starting in the late 1970s to take over the US media. After years of lobbying with the help of corporate media executives, they got the Fairness Doctrine killed in 1987; that made it possible for them to subsidize the rise of Rush Limbaugh, whose show was all but given away to rural radio stations desperate for cheap programming. He ended up getting a large listening base simply because there was nothing else to hear besides farm reports and sermons. And when Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans took over Congress in 1994, the first thing they did was make it legal for foreign citizens to own US media corporations such as TV networks — which meant that the Australian-born Rupert Murdoch could then set up FOX.