By Nicole Lazarre, Joint Center Associate Fellow

An issues campaign is a broader, sustained effort to shift public opinion or policy on a specific topic.

I’ve been researching why liberal donors don’t invest in owned media the way conservative donors do in order to better understand different approaches to issues campaigns.

This report that Harmony Labs and the Democracy Communications Collaborative just released, the Democracy Audience Map, was a great read with some really interesting findings.

It looked at 300,000+ behavioral media panelists, 50 randomized content tests, a year of consumption data across 10,000+ YouTube channels, and hundreds of news domains. It identified eight distinct audience segments—Advocate, Protest, Investigate, Build, Confront, Defend, Referee, and Connect—each defined by values rather than demographics or party affiliation. It found that broad agreement on foundational democratic values exists across all eight audience segments, including conservative ones.

Its core insight is that most pro-democracy content is reaching segments that are already convinced.

Younger, politically mixed, skeptical audiences, the Investigate and Confront segments, consume heavily on YouTube and podcast platforms, distrust institutional framing, and have been systematically reached by conservative content ecosystems for years. Similarly, the Referee and Connect segments, though values-driven and reachable, primarily consume content through YouTube, podcasts, local news, and faith-adjacent platforms, and likewise exhibit skepticism toward institutional framing.

Which raises another question: even if the messaging were right, can pro-democracy content reliably reach new audiences?

If audiences increasingly consume information within highly segmented media ecosystems, the question is not merely whether viewpoint diversity exists. It is whether our media institutions are still structured in a way that allows competing viewpoints to reach one another.

In an era of consolidation, where independent local media is contracting at a rate of roughly two outlets per week, does the foundational premise of the FCC’s public interest standard still hold? That standard comes from the Communications Act of 1934, which requires the FCC to determine whether license transfers serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” In practice, the agency asks whether a transaction is likely to harm the public interest by reducing competition, limiting diversity, or undermining universal service, then weighs those risks against claimed public interest benefits such as efficiencies, expanded service, investment, or innovation. Viewpoint diversity is a distinct FCC concern, which sets its review apart from antitrust analysis.

Nota Bene (for the APA nerds): There is also a threshold legal question about whether that conception of the FCC’s merger-review authority remains viable. The Act plainly requires review of license transfers, but the use of merger review to influence editorial policy, prescribe governance structures, or indirectly reshape labor practices may be increasingly difficult to defend after Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and West Virginia v. EPA, which together reinforce the principle that agencies require clear congressional authorization before asserting authority over matters of major economic and political significance. On that view, a Commission ostensibly committed to a more market-oriented and constrained account of administrative power might be expected to disclaim, rather than retain, an especially open-ended conception of its merger-review authority. The implicit faith behind an earned-media strategy is that between market competition and regulatory backstop, enough outlets exist, enough viewpoint diversity is maintained, and good content finds its audience organically.

Media Matters’ 2024 analysis put numbers on the cumulative result: right-leaning online content has nearly five times the following of left-leaning equivalents. Nine of the top ten online shows by audience are right-leaning.

Fox Corporation generated $16.3 billion in revenue and $2.26 billion in net income in its most recent fiscal year. It is a genuinely profitable media business that also happens to function as political infrastructure. But look elsewhere and a different pattern emerges.

X carries $12.5 billion in acquisition debt, has lost more than 50% of its pre-Musk revenue, and posted an estimated net loss through 2024.  Newsmax went public at a valuation bearing little relationship to its earnings. Rumble posted a $338 million net loss in 2024 against roughly $90 million in revenue.

The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers (roughly 10% of its digital subscriber base) after Bezos quashed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and another 75,000 digital subscribers after he announced that the Post’s opinion section would henceforth focus on “free markets and personal liberties” and would no longer publish op-eds inconsistent with those ideals.

As one former Post columnist put it, the pivot did not make sense commercially because anyone who supports Trump is already being amply served by the right’s comprehensive media machine, while the strategy was virtually guaranteed to continue shedding the Post’s existing subscriber base.

What this pattern suggests is that pure financial return is not the primary motivating factor behind these investments. Intentional, sustained investment in platforms (as opposed to campaign advertising spend) appears to be a defining feature of conservative donor strategy. Media is treated as infrastructure, regardless of short-term financial return. This means conservative donor are not solely reliant on institutional media or organic reach to fill the structural gap. Success is measured not measured solely by EBITDA but by movement of the Overton Window—the range of ideas the public considers acceptable—and by proximity to regulatory and political power.

Is there anything indicating similar strategic investments by pro-democracy donors and PACs? Yes, but at a fraction of the scale and with very different strategic logic.

Pod Save America is a great example of a pro-democracy media investment that has built a substantial audience and a sustainable business model. The difference is not that these investments do not exist. It is that they appear to be pursuing a different theory of change.

According to the report, much of the pro-democracy media ecosystem continues to reach audiences that are already highly engaged and ideologically aligned, while many of the persuadable segments identified in the Democracy Audience Map consume information through very different channels and ecosystems.

If the report is correct, the challenge may not primarily be one of message development. It may be one of distribution.

More to come.