Which came first? SuperTalk Mississippi’s fawning over Republicans, or the millions of public dollars that Republican officials directed the radio network’s way?
Whichever it was, it’s obvious that giving Republican elected officials and their friends lots of free air time and loads of backslapping has been very good for SuperTalk’s business.
Just how good has been detailed by Mississippi Today as part of its continuing investigation into the state’s massive welfare scandal.
SuperTalk reportedly received more than $630,000 of these welfare funds for advertising and other promotional services, an expenditure that State Auditor Shad White two years ago listed as questionable but for which there has been no demand, at least none so far, to repay. Among the obvious questions was how advertising to SuperTalk’s audience — conservative and mainly white — matched with the audience that the welfare funding was supposed to help — poor and majority Black.
Most of those advertising dollars, according to Mississippi Today, were funneled to SuperTalk through the two nonprofits that ran the now-discredited Families First for Mississippi program. At the same time as SuperTalk reaped in that money, it was helping to hype Families First in its talk shows as a model program that could help the poor obtain self-sufficiency. It was also patting on the back some of the individuals who later were convicted of using Families First as a front to enrich themselves and others or to fund projects that had nothing to do with helping the poor, such as building a volleyball arena at the University of Southern Mississippi or investing in a pharmaceutical start-up.
There’s no suggestion that SuperTalk and its principals was privy to any of these schemes, but it was guilty of being a less-than-critical observer of how the public’s money was being spent, at least when it came to expenditures directed by Republican officials, their supporters or their appointees.
This blind spot at SuperTalk did not just involve Families First either. The radio network has been co-opted by its financial connections to others in the GOP who decide how state advertising dollars are spent. Since 2009, a time of nearly total Republican dominance of state government, SuperTalk’s parent company, TeleSouth Communications, received at least $6.2 million in public funds in advertising buys from various state agencies, according to Mississippi Today’s research.
Spend that kind of money with a media outlet, and you’re bound to find it pretty friendly.
