It was a bizarre experience. Having worked in radio back in the ’60s and ’70s, I had some knowledge of the industry, so when we got home from Michigan, I wrote an article, “Talking Back to Talk Radio,” about how liberal talk radio might succeed, if done right. Sheldon and Anita Drobny, a pair of progressive venture capitalists, read my article online, and as Sheldon noted in his book Road to Air America: Breaking the Right Wing Stranglehold on Our Nation’s Airwaves (in which he reprinted the article), it became the template for a business plan for that ultimately ill-fated network.

But rather than wait the almost two years it took the Drobnys to launch Air America, Louise and I, with the help of a local radio guy and friend, Rama Schneider, looked around Vermont and found a station in Burlington that was willing to put us on the air. The slot was Saturday mornings at 10 a.m., right after the swap-and-shop, so many of our callers, instead of discussing politics, wanted to know, “Is that John Deere still available?”

Ed Asner was kind enough to come on as a guest, helping us make a tape that caught the interest of the i.e. America Radio Network, run out of Detroit by the United Automobile Workers. Suddenly, broadcasting from our living room in Montpelier, Vermont, in a studio I’d thrown together for a few hundred dollars mostly from parts bought on eBay, we were on the air nationally, including Sirius satellite radio, taking on Rush Limbaugh (and beating him in some markets) in the noon-to-3-p.m. slot to this day.

In 2004, when Air America was finally rolled out, it was successful for as long as it was in large part because its programs were carried by stations owned by what was then Clear Channel and is now iHeartMedia: we were on more than 50 Clear Channel stations in the nation’s major markets.

Following a string of Democratic victories in cities and states where Clear Channel was carrying Air America shows, the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and Thomas Lee.

Around that time, Clear Channel began pulling Air America’s progressive programming off the air, dramatically cutting Air America’s audience and their advertising revenue. The new progressive network was soon bankrupt, and two years later so was Clear Channel (because of the debt load dumped on it by Romney’s business model), then reincarnated as iHeartMedia.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine continues to elect Republicans with big funding from right-wing corporations and the billionaires who own them and fund right-wing think tanks. As Ken Vogel et al. pointed out in a 2011 article for Politico, “The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million [a year] to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s—and considers it money well spent.”

To the best of my knowledge, none of the talkers on the left have ever been funded in such a fashion. Small wonder that Hannity now owns a real estate empire worth tens of millions, and Limbaugh can brag of an eight-figure net worth or more. But more important, the influence of those two well-financed talkers has altered America’s political landscape in less than three decades. What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the libertarian billionaires, understand the power of media (and took Lewis Powell’s advice).

Those of great wealth who are aligned with the left in America, however, have always largely ignored media, probably because they grew up in an America with the Fairness Doctrine and before the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and they always just assumed that “the truth will eventually be known.”

But investing in political media can produce a huge return on investment and transform the politics of the nation. That’s certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable.

Reprinted from The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream with the permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Copyright © 2020 by Thom Hartmann.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.