Rush Limbaugh died on February 17, leaving behind a legacy of lies, bigotry, science denial and conspiracy mongering—as well as a media and political system significantly transformed by his influence.
Limbaugh was a talented broadcaster who forged an intimate connection with his audience. Since he launched his nationally syndicated radio show in 1988, his success has helped to inspire an army of lesser talk radio clones, fueled an explosive growth in right-wing media generally, and introduced a new era of conservative commentary and politics steeped in aggrieved resentment and a willful disregard for facts.
Limbaugh’s influence can be seen in everything from 1994’s “Gingrich Revolution” to the Bush administration’s baiting of “reality-based communities” to the Tea Party movement to the January 6 storming of the Capitol. It is no exaggeration to say that the Donald Trump movement is in many ways the culmination of the project Rush Limbaugh has been working on for more than three decades.
By the time FAIR published its pioneering 1994 report on Limbaugh, “The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh vs. Reality” (Extra!, 7–8/94), his show was already the biggest thing in talk radio, Ronald Reagan had dubbed him the leader of the conservative movement, and George H.W. Bush had carried Limbaugh’s luggage to the White House Lincoln Bedroom. GOP leaders would soon credit the talk radio host with helping flip the House in their favor in the 1994 elections.
Our report provided dozens of examples of Limbaugh’s penchant for falsehoods, like his claims that bra size is inversely correlated with women’s IQs, that there is “no conclusive proof” nicotine is addictive and that “the poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe.”
Ad for FAIR (USA Today, 12/7/95) featuring praise for Rush Limbaugh from politicians and media figures like Ted Koppel and Tim Russert.
But despite his power and connections, the fact that Limbaugh was a serial dissembler seemed to come as a surprise to establishment media, who treated the report like a breaking story. A clipping service FAIR hired for the occasion found more 1,200 outlets had published an Associated Press story (6/29/94) on our report, while dozens more stories ran from other wire services and newspapers. Why had Limbaugh escaped serious scrutiny for so long?
One explanation is that many of these outlets were complicit in Limbaugh’s rise. As we wrote at the time (Extra!, 7–8/94):
Limbaugh’s chronic inaccuracy, and his lack of accountability, wouldn’t be such a problem if Limbaugh were just a cranky entertainer, like Howard Stern. But Limbaugh is taken seriously by “serious” media—in addition to Nightline, he’s been an “expert” on such chat shows as Charlie Rose and Meet the Press. The New York Times (10/15/92) and Newsweek (1/24/94) have published his writings. A US News & World Report piece (8/16/93) by Steven Roberts declared, “The information Mr. Limbaugh provides is generally accurate.”
A year later, FAIR expanded the report into a book, The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, listing even more Limbaugh falsehoods, and much more on his racism and bigotry towards women, LGBTQ people, the poor, the homeless and people living with HIV.
For many, FAIR’s report and book marked Limbaugh for the first time as a mendacious bigot. David Letterman dubbed him “The Lyin’ King,” House Speaker Gingrich stopped appearing regularly on his show, and media invites became less frequent. When Limbaugh was being considered for a job as a color commentator on ABC’s Monday Night Football program, an LA Times op-ed (6/7/00) by myself and FAIR founder Jeff Cohen reportedly played a role in ABC ultimately denying Limbaugh the job.
Leave Rush alone!
Rush Limbaugh, 2006
Based on my long years of listening to talk radio, Limbaugh’s mastery of the medium owed much to his obvious talents—his voice and his usually light entertaining manner—and to the intimacy of a medium in which listeners, typically alone when they tune in, develop a deep if one-sided personal connection to the hosts.
And here was where Limbaugh set himself apart from other talkers. As he projected a view of himself as a victim, he also nurtured the same aggrieved sensibility in his listeners. If you listened for any amount of time, the “Rush and me against the world” vibe came through in both host and callers.
One early example of this was Rush’s false claim (Extra!, 11–12/94) that critics were campaigning to silence him through reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, which he referred to as a “Hush Rush” bill. In reality, the doctrine was never a threat to talk radio hosts, who by virtue of taking calls from listeners with various perspectives were seen as naturally complying with the FCC rule. (The rule was widely misunderstood as requiring “equal time,” which it never mandated—Extra!, 1–2/05.) Over its entire history, not one FCC judgment involving the Fairness Doctrine ever concerned itself with talk radio, which flourished locally under the doctrine for decades before its 1987 scrapping.
If Limbaugh lost some mainstream cachet because of our criticism, by the early ’00s he had served a vital purpose. The right had built up its own outlets, so conservatives didn’t need the validation of the establishment to thrive. The conservative media establishment that the right dreamed of since the days of Richard Nixon (Extra!, 3–4/95) and the Powell Memo had been realized. The year after our LA Times op-ed, Fox took over first place in cable news, and has remained there ever since. The new conservative media firmament adopted the language of grievance and resentment from the man who showed how to use establishment scorn as a recruiting tool better than anyone until Donald Trump.
It may be too simple to say that without Limbaugh, there would be no Trump, but before Limbaugh there wasn’t really a conservative movement; there was an alliance of convenience between the religious right and pro-business conservatives, who disagreed on several issues (FAIR.org, 3/6/18). Limbaugh’s show taught these disparate parts of the right that they should be one big happy family. Trump took Limbaugh’s lessons to heart, and to the White House; that may be Limbaugh’s most lasting legacy.
Sidebar:
Why Talk Radio Blew Up
Talk radio not only thrived for decades under the Fairness Doctrine, it was rapidly growing in the decade before the doctrine was scrapped. A variety of factors unrelated to the doctrine contributed to the growth of talk radio in general, and conservative talk in particular. As musical programming fled to higher-fidelity FM signals, AM programmers were left with empty schedules to fill. At the same time, improvements in satellite technology and cheaper 800-number telephone lines were making national call-in shows more feasible (“Talk Show Culture,” EllenHume.com; Extra!, 1–2/07).
This confluence of factors created opportunities, and conservative talk radio, which was already going strong locally across the country, took advantage of them. Limbaugh, who’d been getting good ratings on Sacramento’s KFBK, was just one of many conservative talk hosts who benefited; in 1988, he moved to New York to launch the syndicated show on WABC that brought him to national attention.
—S.R.
Radio active toxicity
I heard him a few times……perhaps his name was RUSH, for his penchant for hyperbole and his constant need to diss women and creating conclusions which were never there in reality. Perhaps that was his attraction to men who were like him. But too, he was a complainer of what just about anyone did. I suppose that his attraction to others might be attributed to: “misery loves company?”
Nice try but you have the dialectic flipped.
The current politics of our two feuding wings of the one party duopoly are what created Rush Limbaugh. Had the masses of the aggrieved, who suffer under this rigged one party duopoly, not been there in the first place, Rush Limbaugh would have been laughed off the radio.
Nonsense. What does the duopoly have to do with Rush Limbaugh’s mass appeal to chauvinists who got off on misogynistic jokes? How about jokes and hatred directed at Mexicans and Hispanics, who have been in this country long before whites purchased Texas, California, etc.?
There is indeed a one party (War Party) duopoly where 90% of issues are concerned, but the people who vote for the Red side have been the most hateful and divorced from reality dating back to Rush Limbaugh, who they NEVER would have laughed off the air because they gravitated to the false premise that Trump supporters cling to today: the imagined persecution of white males that the rich use as a wedge to keep working class whites from banding together with working class blacks. White aggrievement is a thriving industry, bro.
Kyle,
There are two parts here that you presuppose in order for my comment to indeed function as “nonsense” as you say.
1) First, the failures of our rigged political system (which empirically predate Limbaugh) would have to be non existent. In other words that is the answer to your first question.
2) Second, you are conflating what Limbaugh later became, with the toe hold he got in the first place (which I posit was a function of failing the masses).
What Rush began yapping about when he first started (which was nowhere near as misogynistic and racist), would have been irrelevant throughout the mid nineties and early 2000’s had there not been a concomitant rise of the neoliberal moderate Republican agenda of the Democratic Party.
You going to tell me that the Dems gutting of the New Deal reforms while deregulating Banking and Wall Street, and defunding other programs for the poor and workers, did nothing to feed the growing number of people who became listeners of Limbaugh? In the absence of an alternative, the shit rises to the top.
Yes, it is true that Rush metastasized into all the repugnant (and true) shit this author claimed about him. It is false though that Rush some how was the sole creator of this country’s rightward drift, and political indifference that our elite ruling class has been running a gamut on since I’ve been alive. Eh-hem, before Rush.
The Democrats right-ward shift wasn’t particularly right-ward until after Rush, with Clinton in 1982.
By that point, Rush had normalized radical, anti-science policy as the hallmark of the Republican party.
The Clintons saw this as a power vacuum, and the neo-liberal media preached non-stop about how a more centrist Democratic party would capture all the power away from the now far-right Republican party.
That is the history of how the Democratic party virtually abandoned the working class.
Certain “thought leaders” debated the move in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until Rush had taken over the Republican party, dragging it away from the center, that the neoliberals decided to completely abandon the New Deal Democrats.
Remembering that Robyn Hitchcock song from 1996, “The Devil’s Radio”:
Sun sets on the Devil
Sun sets on the West
He’s listening to the FM talk show
It’s what he loves the best
Limbaugh
He was talking through a bimbo
But don’t
Touch that dial
Or that hateful smile
Kate said
“The flowers of intolerance and hatred
Are blooming kind of early
This year
— Someone’s been watering them”
We was listening
Ah, we was listening to the Devil’s radio
Interesting comments, some purporting a meta-analysis of Rush’s rise and influence.
I suppose sarcasm, flippancy, and snark don’t need much preparation and in-depth thinking. Rush brought this talent to talk radio. He brought that crank-at-end-of-the-bar glibness and self-victimization to the table, er, airwaves. Unfortunately, someone read the commercial potential for the type and sat him behind a microphone. Politics offered him a perfect foil. Bland, democratic, pro-business policies _and_ a sluggish post-Reagan “trickle down” economy were all Rush needed to take off. The victims of these two factors began to grow to the tens of millions. Rush offered them a demon: the democrats, and a messiah, the GOP.
No lie was too big or no one-liner too unfunny for the have-nots victimized by the post-Reagan (and even post-Clinton) haves. Rush pointed out the obvious: his listeners were getting screwed; then scapegoated the latest democrat foible as “the cause.” And the armies of un/der-employed lapped it up.
Small wonder the Gingrich insurgency did so well; or that Trump “happened.”
In short, Rush’s “brilliance” consisted in doing what all opportunists do; he demonized his sponsor’s enemies for a price. Without the bothersome Fairness Doctrine to neutralize, or attempt to correct his one-sided attacks, he became the archetypal corporate, republican apologist. No more, no less.
Be well.
Jesus had his John the Baptist, Trump had his Rush, a creepier piece of junk that has too often walked this Earth, Mike Liston
Burn In Hell!!!!!!!!!!