Hooray for Corporate Profits!!

Now there's an article that is sure to hack off all of the progressive media types and bloggers, and to make it worse it's a feature item on the (hiss) Cincinnati Enquirer website: Clear Channel Earnings Rise. Cue the goose-stepping minions marching in lock-step to those fear-mongering right wing radio hosts! Insert tirade here about how profits are the enemy to Truth and how people have a Right To Be Heard!

At a high level I have some concern that more and more media outlets are in the hands of fewer corporations. But I cannot describe in any rational terms why this is necessarily bad, especially when other publications are able to find their audience. One notable example is the Cincinnati Beacon - our local alternate media organ for outraged pseudo-progressivism - they object to the term 'liberal' - and anti-corporate venom. They continue to keep kicking after several years in the business, and have even expanded to include a print edition.

A sample of their political rhetoric explains at once why the Cincinnati Beacon continues to earn an audience. The Cincinnati downtown has recently seen an explosion of growth, and a part of that success can be ascribed to the 3CDC, a non-profit development group that has played a role, for example, in revitalizing Fountain Square. Here's how the Beacon describes 3CDC on their wiki:

This is a non-profit group established by powerful members of the area’s inner-sanctum for the purpose of advancing a private development agenda for key areas of downtown Cincinnati. Though the group’s work impacts Cincinnati and its residents, as of this posting (October 22nd, 2006), no public oversight group exists to insure that the public’s interests are protected or represented through the group’s activity.

The purple prose is totally priceless. And a Google search for Beacon articles about the 3CDC yields a treasure trove of scandalous and shocking assertions and discoveries about, say, the parking garage downtown, or (gasp) the fact that some of the businesses on the square may actually be attempting to make money. And no oversight group exists! No oversight group exists for sanitattion workers either - the difference here is that filthy, sinful profits may be involved, and therefore there's an invented civic obligation for some public involvement beyond basic voting.

Some people lap that stuff up - it plays to a mindset that suggests that the world is controlled by forces beyond our control, that prosperity locks people out, and that if we stopped rewarding commerce with wealth our society would somehow become more fair. I'd love to see the Beacon, like Clear Channel, rake in the advertisers and make a booming business from the political agitprop they do so consistently well. In fact, I'd be pleased to see them rolling in profits ...

Tags: Clear Channel, Cincinnati Beacon, 3CDC, Capitalism