Maher: “You mean the Oxycontin that he was on?...Why couldn’t he have croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?” — HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, February 8, 2008.
Democrats inside and outside the Obama White House have declared a Public Enemy Number One, and it isn’t some vague concept like Poverty or Terrorism or Cancer. It’s a radio talk show host named Rush Limbaugh. Over the years, liberals haven’t just wished his wildly popular radio program would fail. Some have wished he were dead, on national television.
Limbaugh recently joined a group seeking to purchase the National Football League’s St. Louis Rams, which spurred the latest attempt by the American Left to drive Limbaugh off the radio and far away from a place in the mainstream of American life. Limbaugh and his tens of millions of listeners are routinely placed by the media on the menacing fringes.
Almost from the beginning of his nationally syndicated radio show in 1988, Limbaugh has brought out the worst in journalists who are supposed to honor fairness and accuracy. They have presented Limbaugh not merely as a commentator, but as a clear and present danger who must be curtailed. Network stars have showed more neutrality toward the humanity of Saddam Hussein than they allowed for an American talk-radio host.
This year’s attacks on Limbaugh began with an interview taped on January 19 for Fox News. Limbaugh told Sean Hannity that the media worked to elect Obama. He pointed out that the media’s elders came of age during the civil rights protests of the Sixties, and they’ve taught young journalists to see politics through the same prism of affirmative action: “Racism in this country is the exclusive province of the Left. We’re witnessing racism all this week that led up to the Inauguration. We are being told that we have to hope Obama succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this was the first black President. We’ve got to accept this.” The media establishment lined up to denounce Limbaugh and demanded that Republicans distance themselves from his claims.
— MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell anchoring the 3pm ET hour of MSNBC Live, January 26, 2009.
— CNN’s Jack Cafferty on The Situation Room, January 27, 2009.
— Chris Matthews on his syndicated The Chris Matthews Show on February 22, 2009 teasing a segment about Rush Limbaugh criticisms of President Obama’s policies.
— Exchange on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, March 2, 2009.
— New York Times writer Timothy Egan on the Times “Outposts” blog, March 4, 2009.
— New York Times columnist Charles Blow on Republican Party chairman Michael Steele’s apology to Limbaugh for saying on CNN that his show was “ugly” and “inflammatory,” March 6, 2009.
– MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on his syndicated Sunday program The Chris Matthews Show, March 8, 2009.
— CNN commentator Jack Cafferty, March 10, 2009 edition of The Situation Room.
— CNN anchor Aaron Brown on the October 10, 2003 NewsNight after Limbaugh announced he was seeking treatment for an addiction to prescription pain medicine.
■ “Empathy has never been one of Rush’s strongest suits. Do you detect anything in his broadcast yesterday that would suggest that Rush is now going to become a kinder, gentler Rush Limbaugh?”— CBS’s Harry Smith to Syracuse University media expert Robert Thompson on The Early Show, November 18, 2003, the day after Limbaugh ended five weeks of treatment for drug addiction.
—ABC’s Charles Gibson to Bill Bennett on the November 18, 2003 Good Morning America.
— ABC’s World News Tonight, April 29, 2006.
■ “Rush Limbaugh is set to sign a deal with prosecutors today after three years of prescription drug fraud investigations. But did he get off easy?... Coming up on Good Morning America, a rush to judgment? He’s made a deal with prosecutors. Did Rush Limbaugh get off easy?...We’re going to start the half hour with Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host. He’s expected to sign a deal with prosecutors later today....But now there are new questions: Is Limbaugh getting off too easy?”— ABC’s Charles Gibson, Good Morning America, May 1, 2006.
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Countdown, April 28, 2006.
— Fired CBS News producer Mary Mapes, as quoted by former reporter John Mashek in an April 7, 2006 posting to his blog on the U.S. News & World Report Web site.
— Comedian Kathy Griffin on her own USO tour for the troops on ABC’s Nightline, January 20, 2006. In February 2005, Limbaugh spent several days with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
— Writer Jeffrey Goodell in the January 1994 Elle magazine.
— Former Washington Post reporter David Remnick in the Post, February 20, 1994.
— Former NBC News President Michael Gartner in a USA Today column, July 12, 1994.
—Radical poet Allen Ginsberg in The Progressive, August 1994.
—Washington Post reporter David Broder in his April 25, 1995 column.
—Washington Post columnist and chief book critic Jonathan Yardley, May 1, 1995.
■ “Rush Limbaugh is the king. He is also a cretinous liar, with off-the-wall opinions. And he has the audacity to call himself a journalist.”— Infamous anti-American CNN and MSNBC foreign correspondent Peter Arnett quoted by John Corry in The American Spectator, May 1995 issue.
— Today co-host Bryant Gumbel adding to President Clinton’s pointed criticism of talk radio six days after the Oklahoma City bombing, April 25, 1995.
— Then-NBC Sports anchor Greg Gumbel responding to a February 6, 1996 letter from Bob Wagner of Homer City, Pennsylvania (who forwarded a copy to the Media Research Center).
— Washington Post reporter Phil McCombs on comedian Al Franken’s then-new book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, January 19, 1996 Style section.
— Boston Globe TV critic Frederic Biddle reviewing Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz's book, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, February 26, 1996.
Limbaugh’s staff reflected anxiety at the idea of counter-programming the overwhelming wave of celebration at that moment in the media culture. Obama was lauded as a world-class sage and savior, a dramatic contrast to the media’s treatment of Rush Limbaugh. What followed was a typical pattern of intentional misunderstanding. Limbaugh was portrayed as not only unpatriotic, but as beyond the pale of civility – someone the Republicans should be desperate to deny was part of their coalition.
— MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell to Rep. Mike Pence, on MSNBC Live, January 28, 2009.
— Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg on MSNBC live coverage, March 3, 2009.
— Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter in a Web-exclusive column posted on March 4, 2009.
— MSNBC’s David Shuster to former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, March 4, 2009.
— Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe on MSNBC’s Countdown, March 5, 2009.
— NBC’s Today, May 21, 2007.
Wild charges of racism also burst forth when Limbaugh worked briefly as an ESPN football analyst in 2003. He resigned after a liberal firestorm over his disparaging Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb: “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well—black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. There’s a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he didn’t deserve.” Despite plenty of evidence of liberal sports columnists “desirous” of black advancement in the NFL (New York Times columnist Selena Roberts complained the NFL was “white as baking soda”), Limbaugh was glued to amateur geneticists like Jimmy the Greek Snyder and Al Campanis, who lost jobs after suggesting blacks were “bred” for athletics (Snyder) or couldn’t swim (Campanis).
— CBS commentator Nancy Giles on Sunday Morning, October 5, 2003.
—NBC’s Katie Couric to Tim Russert on the October 1, 2003 Today. Couric did not note the source was a 1992 book by the far-left group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
— CBS Evening News, October 1, 2003.
— ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings, October 1, 2003.
The left and Democrats im Congress then mangled Limbaugh’s comments to claim he had said that any servicemen or women who might oppose the war in Iraq in public had been defamed by the talk show host as “phony soldiers.” They typically made no reference to the actual “phony soldiers” Limbaugh was talking about.
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Hardball on September 28, 2007.
— MSNBC’s Hardball on September 28, 2007.
— MSNBC’s Countdown, September 28, 2007.
— CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room, October 1, 2007.
— Co-host Meredith Vieira to former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark, who was pushing to get Limbaugh removed from Armed Forces Radio, on NBC’s Today, October 3, 2007.
Then came Limbaugh’s current bid to seek ownership of the St. Louis Rams. On October 7, the demonization began with St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports writer Bryan Burwell, whose column demonized the entire country, as he claimed these words were Limbaugh’s: “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: Slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” Burwell then added: “I know how those words play out in Idiot America. They are embraced as gospel.” But NFL players wouldn’t tolerate them, he said. No one asked them to tolerate them, and no one in the media seemed to ask Burwell to actually verify them with an airdate or an audio clip.
The Post-Dispatch found the quote came from a book by liberal author Jack Huberman called 101 People Who Are Really Screwing America (a concept and title ripped off from author and former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg, whose original was 101 People Who Are Really Screwing Up America). Huberman has also written the books Bushit and The Bush-Hater Handbook, edited the book The Quotable Atheist, and has titled his weblog “Well to the Left of Attila the Hun.” But he was an agreeable source for the liberal media.
The national onslaught began on October 11, when MSNBC welcomed Dave Zirin of the radical magazine The Nation to spread the quote that Limbaugh believed “slavery had its merits.” Zirin, who was described only as a “sportswriter,” charged that players “don't want an owner who has said slavery was a good thing because it made the streets safer.” Anchor Contessa Brewer accepted the claim as true, wondering about Limbaugh’s bid: “Is there anything the NFL commissioner, or anybody else for that matter, can do to stop it?” Zirin added that NFL players “don't to see a swine owning a ram.” He closed the interview by deriding the radio host as someone who has “open, publicly-stated contempt for people with dark skin.” MSNBC didn’t ask him why Limbaugh has often used black professor Walter Williams as a substitute host on his radio show.
The national media should not be expected to root for the success of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. But they should be expected to allow room for free speech, including space for the idea that some Americans do not wish that President Obama succeed in imposing a liberal agenda on the country. Instead, they have blatantly wished for Limbaugh to fail, and tried to make that failure occur. Obama had a ready ally in the attempt to transform Limbaugh into a pariah when he came to the White House.
Liberals inside and outside the media figures suggest it is a national injustice that Limbaugh has the popularity and influence that he has when his words are so vicious. But while they suggest he needs to be marginalized by the media and the Republican establishment, their coverage and analysis and mockery of Limbaugh has crossed every line of civility and now shows contempt for the elementary rules of evidence.