Liberals dominate popular culture, from a variety of left-leaning entertainment outlets to the magazines which reach your doorstep.
Now, a movie studio dedicated to “social change” wants to bring a new progressive channel to your television remote, a plan engineered to reach the treasured youth demographic.
Participant Media has acquired cable networks Documentary Channel and Halogen TV and will combine them into a single as-yet unnamed cable network to launch next summer with a distribution of some 40 million households, based on those networks’ existing distribution agreements….
The new network will be aimed at a hard-to-reach demographic: 18-34-year-olds, a group notorious for avoiding television altogether.
“Our content will be specifically designed for the viewers that the pay TV eco-system is most at risk of losing,” said Evan Shapiro, who will head the new network for Participant. (Shapiro left IFC to join the production company earlier this year.) “We all know that millennials are changing how media is consumed. However, they also have the strong desire and inimitable capacity to help change the world.”
From the opening bell the new channel will be available in more than 40 million homes.
Among the films Participant Media produced include “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Fair Game,” “Syriana” and the upcoming anti-fracking drama “Promised Land.”
The just-wrapped 2012 presidential elections reminded us just how potent pop culture can be to the political landscape, a lesson not lost on the folks at Participant. The company’s latest salvo in the culture wars is aimed directly at a group of potential voters who will have plenty to say in the years to come.