This excerpt is from Schlesinger's The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval. The whole trilogy, I think, should be read by all serious liberals and progressives. The New Deal set the stage for modern liberalism, and conservatives understand very well what was done (and hate it) while liberals appear clueless.
The excerpt refers to Roosevelt's thoughts on the 36 election.
His (Roosevelt's) main problem, as he saw it, was the business domination of the media of opinion. "If the Republicans should win or make enormous gains," he wrot, "it would prove that an 85% control of the Press and a very definite campaign of misinformation can be effective here just as it was in the early days of the Hitler rise to power. Democracy is verily on trial." But he had one great weapon to counter the opposition of the newspapers. That was his own capacity as President to make news, and this he proposed to use to the utmost....
...Roosevelt's main fear about the election had been the press. His own estimate that 85 per cent of newspapers were against him was an exaggeration. Study of 150 leading newspapers showed that Landon had a combined circulation of about 15 million as against slightly under 7 million for Roosevelt. Of the smaller circulation newspapers, Roosevelt may have even had something close to a majority. But in the larger cities he fell badly behind. Of the big dailies, about 75% were for Landon, about 20% for Roosevelt. In the Chicago Tribune, days went by at the height of the campaign in which Roosevelt did not make the front page (one day he did not even make the paper at all). A typical Tribune lead: "Governor Alfred M. Landon tonight brought his great crusade for the preservation of the American form of government into Los Angeles." A Tribune headline: Roosevelt Area in Wisconsin is Hotbed of Vice.
Though the President complained a good deal about this situation privately, he did little to dramatize it as an issue. Yet the people themselves seemed to understand and resent the attitude of newspapers. During the great demonstration in Chicago, for example, the crowd shouted eptithets at the Tribune and Hearts's Herald-Examiner as the press cars drove by ("Where's the Tribune! Down with the Tribune! To hell with the Tribune!"). "These people no longer had any respect for the press, or confidence in it," commented Jon Stokes, watching the scene. "The press had finally overreached itself."
Under the current circumstances, how do Democrats - or progressives and liberals - get past the huge percentage of the press that is effectively conservative because it is owned by large corporations who see their interests as better served by Republicans? I would guess, given current concentrations of media ownership and the loss of many smaller media outlets, that the numbers are even worse than in Roosevelt's time.