A little more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about Rush
Limbaugh. You can read the article at the link below:
This week, I came across some additional information that
provided more background on exactly how Limbaugh got to where he is today. First,
here’s the update:
He is best known as the host of his radio show The Rush Limbaugh
Show, which has been in national syndication on AM and FM radio
stations since 1988.
Limbaugh hosted a national television show from 1992 to 1996. He
has written seven books; his first two, The Way Things Ought to Be (1992)
and See, I Told You So (1993), made The
New York Times Best Seller list.
Limbaugh is among the highest-paid radio figures. In 2018, Forbes listed his earnings at $84.5
million. In December 2019, Talkers Magazine estimated that
Limbaugh's show attracted a cumulative weekly audience of 15.5 million
listeners to become the most-listened-to
radio show in the United States.
Limbaugh has been one of the premiere voices of the conservative movement in the United
States since the 1990s. He has been inducted into the National Radio
Hall of Fame and the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame During
the 2020 State
of the Union Address, President Donald Trump awarded him the Presidential
Medal of Freedom.
Limbaugh has expressed controversial viewpoints on race LGBT matters, feminism, and
sexual consent. Limbaugh rejects climate
change and has supported U.S. military interventions in the
Middle East. He was also one of the earlier voices pushing the idea that the
coronavirus was a hoax.
He’s a “family values” kind of guy, which may help explain
why he has been married 4 times. Despite his anti-gay positions, he paid Elton
John $1 million to perform at his 4th wedding in 2010, a sum he
could easily afford since he is worth $500 million, a nice chunk of change for
a college dropout.
Rush owes a lot of his financial success to Ronald Reagan,
who repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.
With
that abandonment, talk radio took off, presenting an ideological narrative that
showed white taxpayers under siege by godless women and people of color. The
Fox News Channel was not far behind, calling itself “fair and balanced” until
2017, when it dropped the slogan, because it presented the ideological
narrative that mainstream media (MSM) rejected. Other media outlets tried to
defend themselves against charges that they were biased against that narrative,
so they opened up their pages and television shows to that ideological story.
Increasingly, the extreme Republican narrative spread into the mainstream on
the grounds that the media must show “both sides.”
(Rush
Limbaugh is not the only conservative broadcaster to benefit from the repeal of
the Fairness Doctrine. FOX is the most viewed cable channel, and Sean Hannity’s
program was the top-rated show for 3 year in a row. Like Limbaugh, Hannity did
not graduate from college.
Hannity is paid $40 million a year, and has a net worth of
$250 million.)
By
2014, though, cell phones and Twitter offered images and reports from the
ground in places like Ferguson, Missouri, that showed up the police version of
events, echoed by Fox News Channel personalities
and talk radio hosts, as dishonest… and dangerous. Young Black journalists
called out the reigning narrative that people of color were “thugs” and
“criminals,” but their protests did not change the basic media pattern of “both
sides-ism – until last week.
(If you want to read why Minneapolis was the breaking point. the Atlantic article below provides lots of answers):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/wesley-lowery-george-floyd-minneapolis-black-lives/612391/?utm_medium=10today.media.20200610.436.2&utm_source=email&utm_content=article&utm_campaign=10-for-today---4.0-styling
(If you want to read why Minneapolis was the breaking point. the Atlantic article below provides lots of answers):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/wesley-lowery-george-floyd-minneapolis-black-lives/612391/?utm_medium=10today.media.20200610.436.2&utm_source=email&utm_content=article&utm_campaign=10-for-today---4.0-styling
The
murder of Gorge Floyd in Minneapolis, quickly followed by the video of two policemen
in Buffalo pushing a 75 year-old man to the ground, has changed the narrative
overnight. Large crowds of people in the USA and around the world turned out to
protest police brutality, and the mayor of Washington D.C. had BLACK LIVES
MATTER painted on the streets just north of the White House in bright yellow
paint,
Roger
Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, recently apologized to Colin Kaepernick
(without naming his name), and NASCAR president Steve Phelps issued a statement
about inequality before the start of the most recent race in Atlanta.
Employees
of respectable news outlets (newspapers, radio, and television) are held to a
high standard, and not doing do can result in termination. Even august publications
like “the grey lady” (the New York Times) can occasionally make errors, and it
happened last week when the Times published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, without
doing the appropriate fact checking, which led to the resignation of editorial
page editor James Bennett.
Bennet
ran an op-ed last Wednesday by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton titled (by the Times, not by Cotton) “Send in the Troops.” The
inflammatory piece blamed “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa” for an
“orgy of violence” during the recent protests and claimed that “outnumbered
police officers… bore the brunt of the violence.” Neither of these statements
is true, and they clothe a false Republican narrative in what appears to be
fact. Cotton’s solution to the protests was to send in the military to restore
“law and order,” and he misquoted the Constitution to defend that conclusion.
Another shift
towards sanity occurred on May 29, when Twitter put a warning on a tweet from Trump saying it violates
the platform's rules against glorifying violence.
Early Friday
morning, Trump tweeted about the protests in Minneapolis over the police
killing of George Floyd, saying, “These THUGS are
dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen” while
saying that he could order military action if the protests continue.
The
president ended the tweet with, “Any difficulty and we will assume control
but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
The move by Twitter to label the tweet comes amid an
ongoing feud with Trump after the social media company placed its first
fact checks on some of his posts this week regarding mail-in voting.
The
president just hours earlier signed an executive
order aimed at increasing the ability of the government to
regulate social media platforms, a marked escalation of his lengthy feud with
Silicon Valley over allegations of anti-conservative bias.
Although
Facebook still has not taken similar action, it likely will be forced to do so
in the near future – and that’s the way things out to be.
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