Wanna Know Why We the People Really Don't Know Squat?

[Octafish]

36. Money.

Michael Parenti: I think alternative media is our only hope, media like community radio stations like KGNU, and the Guardian and Monthly Review, People's Daily World, In These Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Z and other alternative publications. The trouble is that those with class power, those with lots of wealth, can reach tens of millions of people. Those of us with very little wealth can reach only a small audience market. Because of our viewpoint we can't attract much advertising. The advertisers are all part of the business class. So we have little publications with limited circulation teetering on the edge of insolvency. Most Americans have never heard of The Nation, which is by the way only a liberal magazine. That magazine has been publishing for 120 years, yet they haven't heard of it. There are more people in America today who have heard of and read USA Today than have read The Nation, and USA Today has been around for about seven or eight years. That's because Gannett can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put their rag up on satellite and get instant distribution. Within a couple of years USA Today becomes the third-largest selling newspaper in the country. It's a bubble-gum newspaper, a newspaper of the television age with seven different colors, with stories rarely longer than 500 words. So it's not that demand creates supply, it's that supply creates demand. People could say, "Well, you on the left don't sell much because nobody's interested in your message." It's not true. The public doesn't even know we exist and they've never heard our message.