interviews
Sam Seder
Detail:
An interview with Sam Seder. Air America Radio Talker and Filmmaker.
>> continued from Part 1
of transcript
You do cover it, but you’ll mock it.
I mock the coverage of it, and that to me is satirizing the media. I don’t give a shit. More than anything else, I think that if there’s anything that is substantive that supposedly hurts my viability in some circles in the radio world. That’s it. I just don’t care about Anna Nicole Smith or whatever the latest of that version is. I can’t be bothered to waste time reading about it.
I always thought that was subterfuge. Why can't there be someone who caters for one style of radio (politics and talbloids) and another style that's more straight politcs
I think too the extent that there are so called liberals
in the context of the radio industry. Have you heard the term ‘High
Broderism’? (David Broder of the Washington Post). This notion that
partisanship or intense passion about politics from the liberal side is
seen as ‘marginal’. To the extent that there are liberals
in the radio industry, they share that same thing. Rush Limbaugh would
never talk about those things, he doesn’t just because he doesn’t
care unless there’s an occasional story that feeds into his broader
narrative. Hannity will follow that shit more because that falls in their
narrative.
I actually believe the future of progressive talk is one which is not
only progressive or liberal or leftist but develops its own media narrative
to what’s important and what’s not. I think the audience tunes
in to our shows because they don’t want to hear that bullshit anymore.
You’ve talked in the past about the Right Wing paving a more lucrative path in their infrastructure as far as books, think tanks and talk radio etc.. Could you speak to that?
I think Eric Alterman did the definitive work on this,
The Sound and the Fury (searching) What Liberal Media? If you are a young
Republican in college and you get out and want to work for a Right Wing
think tank you have multiple options. You’re starting salary is
more than competitive with some of the better jobs in corporate America
and that’s simply not the case if you’re a liberal.
You can see it with the blogs too. From a liberal perspective, if there
was $40,000 a year for a hundred left wing bloggers. You’ve have
a thousand, ten thousand people applying for it. Who knows how many? There’s
just more money for the right wing, for them it’s closer to an actual
investment. They will actually see some financial gain, after 15, 20 years
the idea that anybody would be calling the Estate Tax that would apply
to a couple that’s giving more than $7 million to their kids “The
Death Tax” and have any percentage of the American Public believe
that it would apply to them when in fact it applies, off the top of my
head only 0.2% of the population. There’s actually payback for it.
From a liberal perspective there is no actual financial gain for putting
money into the system. The end result is simply that you can have a deeper
bench, you have more of an infrastructure, you have more of a machine.
You know Rupert Murdoch loses millions every year on the New York Post.
He lost millions on Fox, he will never see a profit on the New York Post.
He’s probably lost hundreds of millions on it since his ownership,
He’ll never see a profit and he knows that but there’s value
in that for him. We simply do not have the analogy on the left
If you believe in a cause, you pursue it right?
You can find plenty of examples, that book by Daniel Brooks
‘The Trap’, Anya Kamenetz "Generation Debt".
You’re seeing it in teachers and social work, if it’s hard for people to make a living you’re going to drive people out of it. One of the things I’m trying to do with AirAmerica.com is to get small bloggers, bloggers that don’t get well trafficked and feature them on AirAmerica.com as compensation I do an ad buy with them. I don’t think there are many programs out there that actually put money in the pockets of bloggers this size. We’ve been doing it now since April and I’ve been able to come up with a lot of people but it’s hard to find people. I want to find someone who’s at least blogging 4 times a day at least and doing it on fairly general topics because that’s what is going to best suit our audience. That’s a hard combination to find because if you’re a small blogger you can’t do it professionally, you have to have another job. If you’re a small blogger more often than not you’re doing some type of niche so you can attract a bigger audience because you can’t necessarily compete with a full-time blogger and so that’s a hard thing to find.
Why there isn’t money that a wealthy liberal has
donated to some type of blogger foundation or set up one, I’m just
shocked by it. Dollar for dollar I don’t know how you could get
more value. At the end of the day, I think the problem is the liberal
establishment in this country is still part of the establishment and bloggers
and genuine leftists are either fundamentally anti-establishment, inherently
anti-establishment or they’re talking about the redistribution of
the wealth. I think it has to do with their relationship to the establishment
that is ultimately the problem.
Is it even realistic. If you’re getting money from a source you would have to compromise the way you cover your stories, that general compromise that might not work on the left.
It’s tricky, there is something to that. Even if I never said something specific that may have pissed somebody off. In general my disposition… has probably hurt me career wise. It’s not by design, I’m sorry there’s no point in me doing this if I have to fundamentally change my perspective on something. Which isn’t to say it’s a question of integrity it’s more like “why the fuck would I be doing this?”
Maybe you can tie this back to framing. The Right have done pretty well at poisoning the perception of any larger liberal institution, MoveOn, DailyKos, George Soros. They’re all pejoratives and they’re all the big establishment, monied places on the left. If you’re a blogger affiliated with any of those things you’re perceived as being what Bill O’Reilly calls “the far left”
First off, Soros and the DailyKos are dramatically different things
But they’re the same in terms or perception?
Well they’re perceived in the right as evil because
they’re liberal but the DailyKos is not the establishment. Soros
in some respects is, so that’s fundamentally different. The Right
is very good at blasting those things because many of our Democratic politicians
are (searching) What’s the word? Wimps? I want to be more extreme
but I also don’t want to be inappropriate. They’re just wimps.
If its easier for them to sell out MoveOn or the DailyKos they’ll
do it. Then there’s also people who go on television who knockdown
MoveOn because they think it will get them favour from a political perspective,
ratings or be controversial. It’s just lame, it’s pathetic.
Absolutely pathetic.
The fucking Heritage Foundation is putting out papers saying to George
W Bush in 2001 “Don’t hire people based on their skill but
hire them on their personal loyalty to you”. That’s fucking
insane. MoveOn is nothing but essentially an aggregate of 3.5 million
people who give a shit. I can assure you the Heritage Foundation represents
no one, to the extent MoveOn buys anything or does anything it is funded
by its membership in a way the Heritage Foundation could never hope to
be.
But its an easy target because they’re not part of the establishment.
It’s a safe thing to do. It’s always safe to take a crap on
the powerless or the ones who don’t have the power over you.
You’ve talked about careerism being the overriding motivator for most journalists and politicians. Could you elaborate on that?
I think for a lot of journalists the bottom line is they’re
far more concerned about their career trajectory than they are in some
higher notion that their work being a vocation in some regard. I don’t
just mean that they’re not willing to jeopardize their jobs because
I don’t know that I would hold journalists to that standard necessarily.
I think when you’re talking about going and lying in front of the
American public and the world to lead a nation into war then I think It’s
perfectly valid that you’re willing to sacrifice your job cuz I
think Colin Powell is always going to be able to make money.
You know I don’t necessarily have those expectations of a journalist
but there is a difference between I don’t want to lose my job and
I want to get a better job quicker and so I’ll just be a lackey
or I won’t rock the boat. Or ill just be lazy! I’ve never
seen a journalist get punished for abject laziness. Never. Sometime it’s
just astonishing, that’s a problem we’re having a across the
board with most professions now, money has become the ascendant value
in this country over the past 15, 20 years. I think that’s a problem
for every profession and I say this as a person who wants to make a bunch
of money. It’s just question of what I’m going to have to
do for it.
Do you think pundits are less harmful in a way as they are more transparent in their self interest and ego?
Yeah but it also depends on what you consider a pundit. There’s some validity there but it would be nice if the lines weren’t so blurred. Fox is opinion media just like AirAmerica or the Nation Magazine and they should have the integrity to market themselves that way. There are no news people per se on Fox, to a certain extent they’re all pundits and they should market themselves that way. There are good journalists out there too but certainly a journalist who is lazy and a lackey for the establishment can do more damage than a pundit.
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