This Ain’t A Scene: It’s A God Damn Arms Race

By driftglass — January 1, 2016

Just imagine how different the world would be if the Catholic Church had had the foresight to just buy the Boston Globe outright.

Well, while the American Fascist Party continues to attract hoopla and horror on the national stage...

...down below the radar, deep inside America's Laboratories of Democracy, while the institutional Left continues to lose ground and throw nickles around like manhole covers, the Right continues to spend whatever it takes to control the means of of message production.

From the Lincoln Courier:

Illinois News Network buying Illinois Radio Network

By Bernard Schoenburg

Posted Dec. 28, 2015 at 1:25 PM
Updated Dec 29, 2015 at 11:08 AM

The Illinois News Network, a media arm of the Illinois Policy Institute, is acquiring the Illinois Radio Network, which has reporters in Springfield and Chicago and provides news reports to stations throughout the state, including WTAX-AM in Springfield.

“We are thrilled to have Illinois Radio Network becoming a part of INN,” said John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, in a news release. “Both organizations have a history of promoting transparency and accountability in government. And we look forward to continuing that fine tradition.”

IRN is being acquired from Saga Communications Inc., which will continue to own WTAX and other Capitol Radio Group stations in Springfield.

Mike Lawrence, a longtime Statehouse reporter who became former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar’s press secretary and is retired from being director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, called the sale an “unfortunate development.”

“The Illinois Policy Institute ... is a group that has a very definite ideological agenda, and I would be surprised if it did anything else other than to advance that agenda through its newly acquired operation,” Lawrence said...

As I mentioned in February, the INN started out life as the propaganda arm of another well-funded Koch Brothers front group with deep roots in all the usual, radical Hobbsean madness to which all those groups swear allegiance (Hail Hydra!). Thank to the financial backing of crackpot Right-wing billionaires (including $625,000 from Governor Hedgefund since 2009) the IPI has been able to focus on cranking out free ALEC/wingnut "content" and white papers for newspapers to pad out the empty places where journalism used to be before they started laying reporters off in droves.

Then, after Governor Hedgefund was sworn in, he turned to his pals at the IPI to help him staff his administration and enact the terrible policies about which they had been dreaming for years: