Chapter 1: April 2010 update
ZP Heller posted an excellent piece on The Huffington Post on April 1 that is well worth reading if you can get to it. It is entitled ‘Ten Things You Can Do to Help Progressive Journalism”. The fact that ZP Heller had to post it at all speaks to his main initial point: the huge imbalance between the journalistic outlets available to progressives and those available to conservatives.
Glenn Beck has his 2.7 million viewers a day. Rush Limbaugh his own airwaves and $50 million a year. There is “Fox News”. We have so much less. Hence the need:
- to support the media outlets we do have. 800 TV and radio stations nation-wide. Radio shows by Ed Shultz and Stephanie Miller. Free TV by Laura Flanders (grittv.org) and The Young Turks (the youngturks.com). Plus MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews; and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”
- to subscribe and read the very high quality progressive weekly and monthly magazines: The Nation, The American Prospect, Mother Jones….
- to consult regularly – and contribute to – progressive blog sites (for example, AlterNet)
- and, of course, to make full use of this site as and when you can!
David Coates holds the Worrell Chair in Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Answering Back: Liberal Responses to Conservative Arguments, New York: Continuum Books, 2010.
He writes here in a personal capacity.
