This week, as I watched the Bill O'Reily/JetBlue/YearlyKos drama unfold, I was also, coincidentally, reading Jeff Cohen's memoirs of his time in cable TV, Cable News Confidential.  The book got me thinking about the state of progressive TV, and it drew my attention to a gaping hole in progressive media infrastructure.  There are very few well-known progressive TV shows, online or offline, capable of breaking into distribution on a cable channel.  Even if George Soros, or some other angel, were to announce the creation of a brand new progressive cable TV channel tomorrow, there would be very few shows ready to fill all of those new slots.

Follow me across the flip, for a brief summary of the book, and a quick glance at the state of progressive TV.

Cohen, a progressive media reform advocate from FAIR, found himself bouncing around cable TV in the past decade or so, filling a variety of roles at CNN, then Fox News, and finally MSNBC, before eventually quitting the business for good.  Cohen draws a number of lessons from his personal experience, but his most emphatic point is that the conservative tilt of cable TV has more to do with the corporate culture in which stations are ensconced than it has to do with the true desires of viewership.  Cohen draws a stark contrast between Fox News, which designed a series of political talk shows around a niche audience and succeeded, and MSNBC, which thought it could beat Fox by offering a variety of content to a wide audience.  MSNBC's bias, drawn from directives from management at GE, included a vague notion that progressive politics was dirty, and a very clear notion that it had to claw its way into the top two slots in cable TV.  The result was a station which more-or-less brainlessly showed conservative-lite fare in the pre-Iraq period, and which routinely lost rating wars with Fox News.  It's a fascinating book, not least because it offers a rare, up-close, progressive insider view of cable news.

What I find most interesting about the book, however, is that in the four years since Cohen left cable TV, very little has changed.  There are now three well-regarded and well-rated progressive shows on cable news: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Countdown.  Three progressive shows is better than none, but even these shows are not perfect.  Most obviously, the anchors are all white men, and don't come close to reflecting the diversity of the progressive movement, or the one-half of the country which generally votes Democratic.  Furthermore, they are all controlled by corporate parents whose devotion to progressive media is not assured.  More subtly, while these shows generally embrace the progressive worldview and talking points, they are not really of the progressive movement per se, with the possible exception of Countdown.  It's easier to find a conservative author than a liberal one on the Colbert Report.  Stewart regularly hosts moderate Republicans, and usually treats them with kid gloves.  And both Colbert and Stewart augment their anti-Bush fare with a pretty hefty dose of self-promotion that engenders a cult of personality more than it supports movement-building.

Don't get me wrong.  I love these shows, and I'm glad they're around.  Colbert has literally had me rolling on the floor.  And there's nothing wrong with a TV show having fun with its audience.

But that doesn't change the fact that while conservatives have an entire cable TV channel self-consciously packaging itself in conservative rhetoric and targeting a conservative audience, progressives have, perhaps, a single self-consciously progressive cable TV show.

It's not enough to blame coporate control of cable TV for this problem.  With distribution channels like YouTube and blip.tv, and promotion channels ranging from the blogosphere to Drinking Liberally and beyond, the progressive movement has the capacity to support at least a few daily progressive TV shows.  With a large and growing Congressional Progressive Caucus, and with a newly-minted fleet of progressive governors and state legislators throughout the country, and a bevy of bloggers and recently published authors, we're not hurting for guests.  I would wager that there are a fair number of progressives who have sufficient talent in graphics, sound, and multimedia production to pull together a good show.  To top it all off, the emergence of tools for selling online video advertising and subscriptions means that profitability for an online progressive TV show is not just a pipe dream.

So where is online progressive TV?  I've seen a few tentative efforts at building an online progressive TV show - ePluribus media got a podcast going last year, but it didn't last.  We have a number of emerging progressive radio talk show hosts in Ed Schultz, Bree Walker and Al Franken.  There don't seem to be any self-consciously progressive TV shows on YouTube; a YouTube search for "progressive" and "progressive talk show" don't turn up much (more often than not, Olbermann clips).  There are irregularly-produced one-off progressive videos which make the rounds from time to time, and a few shows which update now and again like DomeNation.  But we don't have anything which can really go toe-to-toe with O'Reilly on YouTube.

I'm hoping that someone is working on a plan for an online progressive TV show, with regular updates and high-quality production values.  It would make a great entry into the Blogpac contest, and it would be a great way to make some cash and distribute progressive ideas.

If you do know of some high-quality, regularly-produced, progressive TV shows distributed online, I'd love to hear about them, and I will do my best to use this space to promote them.  If you don't, I'd love to hear your thoughts about how we an enterprising group of progressives could put such a show together, and make it profitable.