WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- The Democrats still haven't gotten over losing control of the House of Representatives in the midterm congressional elections of 1994, much less once again losing control of the Senate in the elections of 2002. They are still beating the drums about how unfair it is that the Republicans have outlets for their messages and the Democrats don't.
In the New York Times on New Year's morning, there was an article by Jim Rutenberg in which he wrote: "For years, Democrats have groused about their inability to balance what they see as the increasing influence over the electorate by advocates of Republican policies."
The piece, predictably, goes on to blame Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel which is, Rutenberg wrote, "considered by many to have a conservative slant."
On a political scale of 0 to 10 -- with 0 being slightly to the left of Nancy Pelosi and 10 being to the right of Attila the Hun -- where would you place NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw? Somewhere between 5 and 4? Sound fair?
How about ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings: Between 4-3? And Dan Rather's CBS Evening News? Between 2.5-1.5 would, I think, be a good number.
Taken together those three broadcasts -- each with a mild center-left skew -- are viewed by about 27 million people per day.
Add to the three network newscasts, the two-hour daily dose of "The World According to the Upper West Side" which is NBC's Today Show -- between 1.5- 0.5 on the scale; minus 1 while Gumbel was still there, and you are at about 33 million people a day.
Now, to Bill O'Reilly who is not, by the way, a lay-down-in-front-of-a-bus supporter of the Bush administration. Let's give him a score of 5.5-6.5 on our liberal/conservative scale.
Sound about right?
On a really good night, O'Reilly will draw maybe 2 million people -- that's about 7 percent of the number viewing the three broadcast newscasts. In fact, those three news shows draw more people in 30 minutes than will tune into the Fox News Channel during the full 24 hours of their broadcast day.
In June of last year, MSNBC decided to exploit what it thought was the vacant niche on the liberal end of the scale, hiring Phil Donahue to anchor its prime time schedule. A couple of weeks ago Donahue's ratings were so low, they barely surpassed asterisk territory.
What about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity? Don't they make up for Brokaw, Jennings and Rather?
If the power of the Limbaugh and Hannity radio shows are so great, why are nearly 95 cents out of every dollar of political advertising spent on television?
The Times' Rutenberg quoted a Democratic party official as saying, "If you start from the premise that the message was right, which we do, then the problem was that it wasn't getting out to the people."
If, however, you start from the premise that a lot of people were getting the message, and even more had the capability of getting the message (but chose not to), then either (A) the message was wrong, or (B) when people tuned in, they found there WAS no message.
Politics in America is a marketplace -- an open-air bazaar -- of ideas. People drift in and out of the aisles looking at the idea in a stall here, sampling the idea in another stall there. Some are professionally packaged; some are obviously homemade, but clever.
Around election time the marketplace gets more crowded as people push in to peek at the temporary idea stalls which have been set up.
Every idea gets a chance, but in the nature of the marketplaces everywhere, some stalls with excellent ideas generate a great deal of attention. Some stalls have good ideas which get lost amid the hustle and bustle of last-minute shoppers. These are carefully packed away to be dusted off, reworked, and put on display next time.
But some stalls are empty.
-- Rich Galen is the editor and publisher of Mullings.com, an Internet newsletter in which this piece, copyright 2003 by Richard A. Galen, was originally published.
-- "Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.
