Yes, He Was Toxic, BUT

 Yes, Rush Limbaugh was toxic to the country, but as I have said before, he wasn't the cause of the decline of public discourse.  The real culprit was the Reagan administration's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the worst federal policy decision of the past fifty years.  The "free speech" claims for repeal were and are completely backasswards, intellectually dishonest,  as providing opposing viewpoints for controversial issues  IS about free speech for other viewpoints and not nonstop propaganda.  The broadcast airwaves, unlike print media, also are limited in spectrum, so it was vital that they serve the public interest.  However, the issue was about the ownership of the airwaves, and those airwaves belonged and still belong to the public.  Providing differing viewpoints serves the public interest, and the public owns the airwaves.  This concept got completely thrown out the window in favor of neoliberal crackpottery the Reagan administration was enamored with.  He vetoed the continuation of the Fairness Doctrine when it passed Congress, and an appeals court said it was strictly discretionary.  Why it was not appealed to the USSC is a mystery to me.  Bork and Scalia were on the appeals court ruling on the matter at the time.  It had nothing to do with "free speech."

And then the feds continued to deregulate the broadcast media into the 1990s.  The situation got much worse with the establishment of Fox "News" by Rupert Murdoch, an Australian PRINT media mogul, and headed by a political operative by the name of Roger Ailes.  Ailes had no background in journalism; he was a propaganda artist first and foremost.  This should have raised alarm bells.  The late senator Ted Kennedy tried, without success, to keep Murdoch out of owning U.S. media, and here we are now with a couple of generations of completely brainwashed people who live in a complete alternative universe.

It was our elected officials who sold us down the river, once again, in favor of ideology or outright greedy corporate interests.  Limbaugh, with huge backing from moneyed interests, became a star and the most prominent hate radio host because of our elected officials.  If it hadn't been for them, he'd have lived out his life as a local or regional talk show host or perhaps returned to the public relations field.

The Mouth That Roared

Famous right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, 70, has died after a one-year battle against stage IV lung cancer.   His wife had announced the death on his radio program today.   His cancer must have been extremely advanced or aggressive, or else he didn't want to go through painful and destructive chemotherapy and radiation plus experimental treatments and let the cancer take its course.  The article said he had "treatment," but who knows if it was all that extensive.

link

I say this because I had a sister who passed away in November 2019 who had the disease (non-small cell lung cancer) for something like six years before she passed.  Her son-in-law, who had the small cell variety, lived for almost 10 years afterwards, and he didn't die of it but of pneumonia instead after suffering from congestive heart failure.  Treatments for lung cancer of both the non-small cell lung cancer and small-cell lung cancer can prolong patients' lives for quite a few years, including those with stage IV cancer.  Both of my relatives had treatments for many years.  Limbaugh had to have declined all treatment thinking it was merely prolonging the inevitable.  He also didn't have kids although he was married to his fourth wife at the time of his death.  That can change perspective of what one is willing to go through no matter how rich the person is.

I have written about Rush Limbaugh from time to time over the years of this blog.  He was originally from Missouri and worked in broadcasting for a number of years, landing eventually in Sacramento, California.  The person who was responsible for getting him that gig was none other than Christine Craft, who became famous in the 1980s for filing an age and sex discrimination lawsuit.  Given how far Limbaugh rose in the world, Craft regretted ever helping him out.

More important than Christine Craft to Limbaugh's career, however, was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.  This was the single most important factor in the rise of hate radio and the radical right.  There has been a radical right for decades in this country, but until the Fairness Doctrine was repealed during the Reagan years with the administration's infatuation with deregulation (and later further media deregulation in the 1990s), it did not gain a foothold in mainstream political discourse.  Furthermore, the Fairness Doctrine required that in order for broadcast media stations to keep their licenses, they had to allow other perspectives on their talk shows and the like.  They couldn't just flagrantly dispense opinion without allowing other viewpoints.  That is because the broadcast airwaves were and are owned by the public, and even now, broadcast media is still the most powerful means of imparting information to the masses.  Cable media was not regulated like broadcast media in this regard, but the Fairness Doctrine merely needed to be updated to reflect cable television, not ditch the doctrine altogether.

Its repeal was singularly responsible for the rise of Rush Limbaugh.  Most talk shows prior to him were local, not syndicated, with most of the syndicated talk shows non-political in content.  Regardless of whether the shows were local or syndicated, they had to present opposing viewpoints on controversial issues.  This all changed when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed.

Limbaugh's show was basically a monologue spewing against the "libs" and whoever else he wanted to target on that program.   When he had callers, they were almost always in agreement with him.  He didn't allow any guests for the most part and didn't even acknowledge there were any other valid viewpoints.  I suspect, however, much if not most of his listener base were the "libs" who seemed to be masochistic enough to listen to Limbaugh's irritating, bombastic voice day after day.  They loved to hate him, and no doubt many of them are dancing in the streets with news of his death.  

Limbaugh, born Rush Hudson Limbaugh III in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on January 12, 1951, was the son of a lawyer.  He has a younger brother, David, who is a noted right-wing author and commentator.  Limbaugh always wanted to be a broadcaster, but fairly early on his career got derailed, so he worked, according to the AP and DM obituary linked, in promotions for the Kansas City Royals baseball team.  Eventually he made his way back on the radio, working in Kansas City and  Sacramento in the 1980s, finally hitting the big time when he became nationally broadcast from WABC in New York.  Unhappy there, he eventually moved to Palm Beach, Florida, where he bought a sprawling mansion and lived a life of luxury, which he could well afford on an annual income of $84 million dollars in 2018.

There were some soap opera aspects to Limbaugh's life, aside from the four marriages and three divorces.  He had been addicted to painkillers, especially oxycontin, and then he suffered from deafness, which resulted in cochlear implant surgery.

Limbaugh was one of a kind, but unfortunately there are way, way, way more people in broadcasting to fill the void.  His career was not the cause, but a symptom, of the decline in political discourse in the United States.

New York Times obituary

 

Television News Was Dead and Buried LONG Before

Phil Donahue, who was nothing but a talk show host anyway and not a journalist, was sacked by MSNBC over his opposition to the Iraq War.

Yes, Donahue was presenting opinion, but opinion was infecting regular news broadcasts long before Donahue got sacked, and that was much more worrisome than anything done to talking heads.

Television news impartiality died long ago, with the Reagan administration's gutting of the Fairness Doctrine. Not only did talk radio do away with any duty at all in using the public airwaves to present opposing points of view (the rise of Rush Limbaugh is a direct result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine), but network news gradually dispensed with any notion of impartiality. The ultimate outrage was Rupert Murdoch's entry into the American news market with his blatantly propagandistic "Fox News Channel." He brought to America the British form of reporting (although he was Australian himself) that always presented a certain point of view, the opposite of what traditional American news organizations which at least had as their goal fairness. The British media would editorialize everywhere in its coverage, whereas American news organizations left opinion on the opinion page in newspapers or commentary segments on television that were clearly marked as such (examples for television would be Eric Severeid's or Howard K. Smith's commentaries). Murdoch, however, went further than anybody when he put a political operative, Roger Ailes, in charge of his news network. This was nothing short of an attempt to buy and shape opinion by creating a propaganda organization.

This would NEVER have happened when the Fairness Doctrine was in place.

We have been suffering from the effects of propaganda ever since.