One of the hot topics among liberals these days is building a media infrastructure to compete with and combat the right. But we already tried Air America, and it failed. So how can we make it work?
I submit these three rules for success in building liberal media infrastructure:
- Know your audience
- Look beyond the news
- Don’t actually make it seem liberal
Who Is this Supposed to Reach?
We don’t need new liberal media infrastructure to woo the die-hard Fox heads – they’re gone. Likewise, much as committed liberals like me might enjoy the content from new outlets designed to appeal to us, existing players like the DailyKoses and New Republics of the world are already doing a fine job serving that space.
That leaves the typical campaign audience of persuadable voters – voters we’ve known for years are typically lower-information when it comes to politics.
There’s a ton of ground to be gained with these lower-information folks, and a ton of value in gaining it. Think how many states there are where winning a few more non-college voters (who are disproportionately likely to avoid news) would profoundly change things.
Air America failed to win over these lower-information voters because your goal with political persuasion isn’t to make other people think more like you — it’s to make them act more like you. So if you want to persuade them, you can’t just show them your stuff and force them to enjoy it somehow.
I cannot stress enough: this audience is different from you, and they always will be.
Consider an experience from the 2020 election. My job as co-leader of my ad agency was to come up with creative that would persuade undecided voters: by definition, people who don’t have a firm opinion about Donald Trump.
Who the hell could live through that many years of Trump without knowing if they loved him or hated him? Not me. And if you’re reading C&E, not you.
But people who don’t pay attention to news? Sure. People who actively hate thinking about politics? Absolutely.
You’re not going to reach people like that with a typical, political, newsy-factsy appeal. They already hate that. The winning creative in our testing has always found ways to get around the walls people build between their brains and politics.
Maybe it doesn’t look and feel like a political ad. Maybe it focuses on some small behavior instead of some big, contested policy. It definitely scratches an itch they have, not necessarily the one you have.
So that’s rule #1. You’re not looking for news consumers with liberal values. And that sets up rule #2 perfectly.
News Flash: Don’t Talk About News
This should be obvious at this point, but if you aren’t targeting heavy news consumers, then making all your programming super news-centric isn’t going to draw them in. That’s what Air America did. People who are looking for political news in the internet era don’t have any trouble finding it.
So like any good content marketer, you’re going to have to go where your audience already is: entertainment.
As someone who watches TV sometimes, it feels pretty obvious what people watch other than news: celebrities, fitness, real estate, cooking, sports, to name just a few.
This is part of getting around that anti-news defense mechanism of the people you need to reach. They don’t always want to hear about politics.
I think in this respect, liberals have gotten misled a little bit by the success of Limbaugh and Fox News.
For the people who tune(d) into those, it’s not necessarily about news. It’s about entertainment. Limbaugh was an entertainer. He just happened to use news as his hook. Joe Rogan is an entertainer. Jon Stewart, for that matter, was an entertainer.
The Gawker/Deadspin empire in its old prime was a good example. They featured gossip and sports content, just like normal, except it happens to have a liberal perspective and stance on reproductive rights, labor vs. capital, etc. This analogy is far from 1:1 – today’s investors in liberal media have different needs – but that’s a bit of the idea.
Make it Seem “Fair and Balanced,” Not Liberal
Thus Rule 3: go beyond liberal values. This is one of the most common mistakes I see from political advertisers. Don’t make your audience come to your news content if they don’t want news content, and don’t make them come to your values if they value something else.
But do use their values to make them come to your conclusions.
Per Moral Foundations Theory (not a perfect tool, but a handy way to think about challenges like this), liberals disproportionately respond to two of the five moral foundations: caring and fairness.
Conservatives don’t. Conservatives, per the theory, respond well to all 5, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
Liberals lose when they stick with caring & fairness. Best case scenario, it falls flat. Worst case scenario, they pick the wrong conservative symbols to try to sell it. That’s when it starts to look like pandering.
Think John Kerry going hunting or Hillary Clinton talking about church. Kerry may genuinely enjoy hunting, and faith may be genuinely important to Clinton, but gestures like those feel off to people because those candidates don’t speak in the right values language.
So how do you make a liberal message with conservative values like loyalty, authority, & sanctity? Well, for one thing, be confident and aggressive in tone. But more importantly, pick and frame topics that align with those values — but roll them up to liberal ends.
For example, programming could focus on betrayals, social hierarchies, traditions, despoiling…”putting people in their place,” if you will.
Except it’s liberal, so it’s not about putting people of color, school teachers, and trans athletes in “their place” or focusing on their betrayals. Instead it’s about the betrayals of CEOs, corrupt politicians, and hate crime perpetrators. And yes, you can absolutely do this with real estate shows, sports, and gossip.
If it seems weird to promote liberal ends by putting people in their place, don’t worry: it is. To you. But not to your audience. For them, it’s just what’s interesting. They’ll follow what’s interesting. And once they’re hooked on something interesting, they won’t mind if you slip in some news content too.
And besides, getting weird on values is a far better compromise than the alternatives people usually suggest, like throwing criminal justice reform advocates under the bus, leaving trans people to the wolves, or similar Sister Souljah-type performances of “moderation.”
Likewise, pretending the national party doesn’t exist and just running on “local issues” is the fastest path to defeat for most candidates in contested districts. Believe me, I’ve worked on their races. This is better.
This is how you make a left media infrastructure that grows the liberal/progressive audience.
Go to where the audience you can grow with is. Look beyond news, look beyond liberal values. And with commitment and time (and good content), it will work.
Will Bunnett is a Democratic content and audience strategist and thought leader on liberal media issues. He previously co-founded and ran Clarify, a digital advertising agency, for eight years.
