Sen. John Kerry says a key reason that the Democratic political message seems so muddled to many Americans is that Democrats have a smaller “megaphone” than the one wielded by the Republicans and their conservative allies.

“Our megaphone is just not as large as their megaphone, and we have a harder time getting that message out, even when people are on the same page,” the Massachusetts Democrat explained to the New York Times for a story about the party’s missed opportunities heading toward Election 2006. [NYT, Feb. 8, 2006]

While Kerry’s observation is undeniably correct - when one considers Fox News, right-wing talk radio, well-paid columnists and magazine racks weighted down by conservative publications - the overarching question remains why Democrats and progressives haven’t invested more in getting a competitive megaphone, writes Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.Com.

Wealthy progressives and liberal foundations can match up almost dollar for dollar with conservative funders. But the American Left has adopted largely a laissez-faire attitude toward media infrastructure, while the Right has applied almost socialistic values to sustain even unprofitable media ventures.

Indeed, the Right’s subsidizing of media may be the most under-reported money-in-politics story in modern American history. Many good-government organizations track the millions of dollars contributed to candidates, but much less attention is paid to the billions of unregulated dollars poured into media.

This imbalanced attention continues even though the conservative media is arguably the most important weapon in the Republican arsenal.

Political “propaganda themes” - often coordinated with GOP leaders - are distributed instantaneously across the country, reaching into both rural and urban America with a repetition that gives these messages a corroborative ring of truth.

The messages echo from talk radio to cable news to conservative columnists who appear in the mostly pro-Republican local newspapers. The themes then are reinforced in magazine articles and in books that dominate the shelves of many American bookstores.

Over the past two decades, Republicans have exploited this media capability with great deftness in consolidating power across large swaths of the country, especially where there is little media diversity (i.e. the Red States).

Read the whole story here

As galling as it may be for some readers to see how major mainstream media outlets are framing the Alito confirmation, the broader problem has been the failure of well-to-do liberals and progressive foundations to finance a media infrastructure that can act as a counterweight to the right-wing media machine, according to Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.Com.

Needless to say again, here at The Locust Fork we agree…