Top Dems Acknowledging They’re Being Outworked On TV, Vow To
Fix it
Okay, here’s some more for you on that big advantage that Congressional Republicans seem to have over Democrats when it comes to getting on the cable chat shows, which I wrote about below.
I’ve now learned that the Democratic leadership’s operatives are privately conceding that they are getting badly outworked by the GOP on the airwaves, and are vowing to take new measures to remedy the situation.
“Republicans are winning this thing right now because more of them are shouting louder, not because of what they are shouting,” one very senior leadership aide who is directly involved in booking Congressional guests on the chat shows conceded bluntly to me.
The numbers show that Dems are badly outgunned on the talk shows. This morning, Politico highlighted a Think Progress study showing that Republicans outnumbered Dems by substantial margins on the cable shows as the stim proposal was being debated.
After working the phones a bit, I’m now convinced that the Dem leadership sees this as a serious problem for them. “Moving forward, we need to be much more aggressive in deploying our folks,” the senior leadership aide said. “We need to saturate the airwaves like it is the week before an election.”
The aide said that the Dem leadership would push bookers to be more aggressive with network producers to book equal numbers of Dems and would also take aggressive steps to push more members of Congress to go on the air. “We’re gonna renew our push to get out there,” he said, adding that the topic was likely to be discussed at the Dem retreat starting today.
“There is also an onus on producers to remedy this issue,” the aide said. “But we are aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it.”
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