Our society is built on equality of opportunity for all, but it galls many leftists that equal opportunity doesn't always lead to equal results. Writing specifically about the millions of media choices available in the world today, Adam D. Thierer points out that the fact that some outlets get more attention than others is the result of freedom, not an impediment to it.
When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it's all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it's just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the left's media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that's not good enough, it seems: they won't rest until all of us are watching, reading and listening to the content that they prefer.
Similarly, in a free economic market some people will grow rich while others grow poor. Does this mean that the people who grew rich had more opportunity than the ones who grew poor? Not at all. In fact, it's exactly the result we'd expect to see in a free market, in which consumers are able to give their money to whomever produces the product they want to buy. Those who produce good products will attract a lot of customers, by the customers' own free wills. Hence Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Google, Honda, etc.
