The Missing Right-of-Center Media

The New York Times ^ | October 23, 2014 | Ross Douthat

[2ndDivisionVet]

Some years ago now, when the conservative media group Newsmax put in a bid to buy the limping, failing Newsweek, I wrote a post arguing that trying to reinvent one of the newsweeklies as a (moderately) right-of-center publication was as good a bet as any. Here was the nub of my argument:

If [Jon Meacham, the previous editor] had wanted to play to what seems like Newsweek’s business strength — its large audience outside the Acela corridor — he would have tried to tilt the magazine toward the center-right rather than the center-left, in the hopes of becoming the go-to outlet for the millions of Americans who think that the elite media is too liberal but find Rush Limbaugh too conservative. He would have staffed up with right-leaning columnists, reporters and cultural critics whose work could translate to a broad, not-that-ideological audience … And he would have embraced Newsweek’s brand advantage in the heartland, and tried to turn that to his magazine’s advantage, instead of convincing himself that he could compete with The New Yorker for the eyeballs and dollars of the liberal intelligentsia.

I thought back to that piece when I read this week’s big Pew report on media and political polarization. The report includes lots of fun tidbits (conservatives have more friends who share their views, but liberals are more likely to break off a friendship over politics), but like a lot of people I was most struck by this chart, showing where, roughly, on the ideological spectrum different publications and channels find their audiences. You’ll see that the overwhelming majority of the media properties surveyed had audiences clustered somewhere on the left-of-center, with Yahoo! News and the Wall Street Journal claiming audiences closest to the political middle....

[GeronL]

leftist media does that all the time too

[GeronL]

Fox News Channel is the #1 cable channel, they must be doing something right.

[GeronL]

You can start a conservative channel but no cable system or satellite channel is likely to carry it and no big advertisers will be caught dead running ads on it and it will be attacked mercilessly in the rest of the media.