Take back the airwaves!

Who ya gonna call? You can kamikaze Rush, G. Gordon Liddy, or Pat Buchanan. Or you can support your local (or national) progressive talk show: Listen up, call in, and be heard.

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Conservative voices have long dominated talk radio, but over the past 10 years the balance has become increasingly skewed. Rush Limbaugh alone is heard on 659 stations nationwide and boasts of 20 million listeners a week. “One-fifth of the electorate is listening to a Republican ideologue,” says Jeff Cohen of the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Media. “He’s become a galvanizing tool for conservative groups.” The New York Times called Limbaugh “a national precinct captain for the Republican insurgencies of 1994.”

Rush and his right-wing brethren dominate the airwaves and attract massive audiences largely by pandering to underlying anger across the country. There are other reasons: Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, now a radio talk host, cites the conservative ownership of radio stations. Texas populist and ABC Radio talk host Jim Hightower argues that progressives tend to “ignore a very democratic little box, the radio, which better than 170 million people a day are plugged into.” And admittedly, conservative hosts score high on the entertainment meter. Ellen Ratner, the left’s voice on the syndicated “Washington Reality Check,” says progressives too often are “so serious and self-righteous you want to run in the other direction.”

But progressive talk shows are starting to fight back. Though still locked out of major urban areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., Hightower’s show is now heard on 130 commercial stations, and its entertaining format–complete with a regular “Hog Report” on government and corporate pork–pulls in strong ratings. Boulder-based Aaron Harber just launched “The Show with No Name,” pending a judge’s decision on Limbaugh’s challenge to its original name, “After the Rush.” “We’re going to listen to him and respond directly the same day,” says Harber, whose show is timed to follow Limbaugh’s. “As much as my stomach will permit.”

If you have a progressive talk show in your area, support it. If not, call your local talk station and demand some balance. (Hightower, Brown, Ratner, and Harber all have syndicated shows available by satellite.) And lighten up.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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