Episode 90: Triple Threat

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement. Sort of.)

Not all of what Lewis Powell suggested has turned into canon by those that follow his memo. Powell was a learned man of his times that eschewed, I suspect, the majority of what the boob tube offers. Therefore, he grossly underestimated what a vast amount of cash could do toward buying the medium that he strongly suggested should be merely watched and criticized. Then again, who could have predicted what that same money, injected directly into the election process, could have done to morph the news medium Powell warned should be watched so closely?

This morphing is the topic of Episode 90: Triple Threat, the rise of the money-media-election complex.

In this episode, I read from Greg Mitchell's book Campaign of the Century, documenting Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for Governor of California; and from Robert McChesney and John Nichols' book Dollarocracy. Audio-wise, I play Senator Al Franken waiting for a potential campaign donor to answer, singing as he does a little ditty he shared with Terri Gross on a Fresh Air interview; and from Counterspin, Jeanine Jackson telling the woeful story of Les Moonves' shocking honesty about what actually motivates national network news. D. L. Myers, of course, read from the memo itself.

I tune up things a bit with Podington Bear's appropriately named song "Dole It Out." I open with KMFDM's "Attak", today backing Henry Giroux, and close with Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today."

As with all my episodes, I'm releasing this under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike, and non-commercial license.