The public gets not one penny from them in return for those airwaves.

The problem of how to make the Internet advertising friendly bewildered and obsessed Madison Avenue for much of the 1990s. Advertising won.

But having said that, there's also a sea change in attitude towards media.

Now, the one thing that's clear is that we need nonprofit, noncommercial media - not just broadcasting - more than ever in the United States. We don't need a purely nonprofit, noncommercial system, but we need a significant nonprofit, noncommercial system. Advertising-run media, profit-driven media, simply is not acceptable as the entirety of our media system. There's no defense for it.

The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective.

Because Hightower's problem, among other things, is that advertisers would be a lot less interested in his show than in Limbaugh's, even if they have similar ratings, because of what Hightower is saying.

The relationship between the media owner, their relationship isn't strictly with people and audiences. It's also with advertisers, and that's the most relationship in radio; in fact it pays the bills.