This is the nut of it:

Just as 9/11 revealed our vulnerability to terror, Katrina has sandblasted the façade of an economy in which poverty has grown, incomes have stagnated, and inequality has skyrocketed. In a city where extravagance is celebrated in night parades and decadence a leading export, you do not have to be an economist to know who has had its children clinging to Coast Guard baskets and its mothers lost in the brackish urban swamp.

We must confront the disparity of wealth that draws such a brutish line between life and death. We have become so accustomed to this gap that, even as it spreads us apart, it intertwines our culture like so much Delta kudzu. Until we notice that the well-off (whose wealth, ironically, was built largely on petroleum) got out, and that those who did not have a working car or $80 loose for two tanks of $2.80-per-gallon gasoline did not.

Why did they die? They couldn't afford to leave. It is one thing to study poverty, to know its causes and effects. It is another to realize that ownership of a car and the ability to fuel it can determine whether you suffocate in an airless attic or watch as a wall of water splits your home.

It is now up to us to decide what to do about this.

Your thoughts welcomed.

TV stations and networks are not in the business of airing programming.  They are in the business of claiming shares of advertising expenses of other businesses.  Large audiences help in this regard, because they allow stations to charge higher rates.  But  advertising buyers are sophisticated.  If they're selling perfume, they aren't interested in buying spots on the six-o-clock news when lots of non-perfume-buyers will be watching.  Buyers are willing to pay premiums for "purer" audiences that may be smaller, but that will reward their expenditures with greater response.  It is why beer is sold on ESPN, and perfume is sold on Oxygen.

From a network or station's perspective, it is the audience that is the product.  The purer, the larger the audience, the better the product.  In this model, the seller becomes the network, whose job it is to devise the most efficient--and cost-effective--means of reaching the most profitable audiences.  The advertisers become the buyers.  There are no "sponsors."

(Want to have fun with Rush, Scarborough, et al.?  Turn down the screeds and turn up the ads.  They tell you just who is paying attention to this stuff.  It is a hoot.)

The easy answer to the question regarding the proliferation of right-wing talk is that there are more right-wingers with night-time leisure time and the income to afford cable subscriptions.  I suspect the real answer is that an ingenious marketer hasn't adequately studied the purchasing habits of a liberal audience sufficiently to understand how to aggregate that grouping for the benefit of Proctor Gamble.  

When that happens, we may rejoice in TV worth watching.   And it may be that we're in ascendancy, which would be a  cause for celebration.  It also may mean we're safe and predictable, which would be less so.