The NAB and Rush Limbaugh

The NAB's Hate Radio Olympics -- Rush Limbaugh

There's no doubt that Rush Limbaugh's primary problem is with reality. FAIR's 1994 report, The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality presented a wide-ranging sample of falsehoods passed on by Limbaugh. For example:

• LIMBAUGH: "The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe." (Radio show, quoted in FRQ, Spring/93)
  
  REALITY: Huh? The average cash income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans is $5,226; the average cash income of four major European nations--Germany, France, United Kingdom and Italy--is $19,708.

But anyone who's ever listened to Limbaugh knows that hating his enemies is what keeps him going. Demonization is his stock in trade. He's the man who invented the word "feminazis," remember? And sure enough, the same FAIR report included a section, Personal Attacks, devoted to Limbaugh's lies involving vicious attacks on people. Here are just the first two.

The first shows just how utterly oblivious Limbaugh is to his own routine expressions of hatred:

• LIMBAUGH: Limbaugh constantly tells his audience that he doesn't make personal or ad hominem attacks. To a caller who had a problem with his personalized attacks, Limbaugh responded with a denial: "Give me a specific example: who, what, when, where, and what exactly did I say?" (Radio show, 2/18/94)
  
  REALITY: One hour before that call, Limbaugh was telling his audience that a 5,000-year-old man found buried in ice--pictured on the cover of Time magazine--was really Sally Jesse Raphael: "This is just what Sally Jesse Raphael looks like without makeup!"

The second just shows his true character. Remember it the next time you hear a Republican use the word:

• MORE REALITY: Columnist Molly Ivins reported (Arizona Republic 10/17/93) this incident from Limbaugh's TV show--"Here is a Limbaugh joke: Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" And he puts up a picture of Chelsea Clinton. Chelsea Clinton is 13 years old.

Even more telling was a sidebar "Rush Limbaugh: Champion of the Overdog," that appeared along with FAIR's Reply to Limbaugh's Non-Response in FAIR's magazine, EXTRA! It included the following attacks on the homeless, Mexicans, and gays:

• "One of the things I want to do before I die is conduct the Homeless Olympics...[Events would include] the 10-meter Shopping Cart Relay, the Dumpster Dig, and the Hop, Skip and Trip." (

L.A. Times, 1/20/91)

Speculating on why a Mexican national won the New York marathon: "An immigration agent chased him for the last 10 miles." (USA Weekend, 1/26/92)

"When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it's an invitation." (Quoted in FRQ, Summer/94) The sidebar began with two insightful observations: "Who says Rush Limbaugh is abusive to minorities? He champions various minority interests: multi-millionaires, bankers, owners of private planes and yachts, drug companies. It's only those other 'minorities'--women, workers, the poor, racial minorities, gays--that he has no use for."

Defending the powerful and attacking the powerless certainly go together with Limbaugh, but there's another connection that's equally important--the connection between hatred and distortions of reality. Hate frequently leads to wild distortions of reality, if not wholesale inventions of pure fantasy, and the reverse is equally true: wild distortions and outright lies are commonly used to stir up hate. For the most part, Limbaugh tries to suppress raw expressions of pure hate. Instead, he presents distorted pictures of reality, which if true would be powerful motivations for hate.

This brings us to the crux of the matter: the role of corporate disinformation in promoting hatred and violence in the world, particularly group hatred and violence. Limbaugh is unusual only as a matter of degree. He presents the basic pathology of corporate media in a concentrated form, so that the connection is unmistakable.

When Limbaugh says "The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe," he's simply externalizing a basic operating assumption of all US corporate media: American's have it made because America is so much better than any other nation. This has two important implications: (1) Every member of an underdog group with a political complaint is just a whiner. After all, they have no idea how good they've got it. (2) We have no reason to listen to, or learn from anybody else. After all, nobody else comes close to doing as well as us. As we've just seen, the premise is wrong, therefore the implications are wrong as well. But America's corporate media follows Limbaugh's lead and acts just like they were true. Consider each implication in turn:

(1) Every member of an underdog group with a political complaint is just a whiner. This implication gives those in power a blank check for ignoring anyone who's lack of big bucks excludes them from the plutocratic system of government by legalized bribery. Seen from this perspective, the seemingly vast difference between Rush Limbaugh and the PBS flagship program, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer (formerly Macneil/Lehrer Newshour), vanishes away to almost nothing.

In their "Media Beat" column for September 27, 1995, "Macneil/Lehrer Newshour at 20: Hold the Cheers," Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon recounted the results of a 6-month FAIR study of every MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour during 1989. Among the findings:

• 
  
• Of U.S. guests, 90% were white and 87% were male.
• Of U.S. guests, 46% were current or former government officials.
• Just 6% of the guests were from public-interest groups (consumer-rights, civil-rights, labor, etc.) critical of government policies.
• Only 1 of 17 guests on environment-related segments represented an environmental group.
• In 7 segments on Central America, all 22 guests were U.S. officials or government officials from U.S. regional allies. There were no representatives from the U.S. mass movement against military intervention--despite the fact that they represented a majority of the American people.

• It's hard to imagine a line-up more in tune with this implication of Limbaugh's lie. But in this case it's not simply a matter of shared

implicit assumptions. Limbaugh rarely hesitates to label those who disagree with him as 'whiners' -- a sentiment that Cohen and Solomon found echoed at PBS:

• 
  "The man soon to become chief anchor of the NewsHour, Jim Lehrer, has little patience with calls for genuine diversity. Former NewsHour staffers have told us that Lehrer dismisses progressive policy critics as 'moaners' and 'whiners' unfit to appear on the show."

• Imus, Stern, Limbaugh and Lehrer all agree: those who don't like what they have to say are just whiners, wimps and moaners. So why listen to them, just because they're a majority? Facts, schmacts. Such is the plutocratic white male consensus.
  
  

(2) We have no reason to listen to, or learn from anybody else. The U.S. corporate media--including PBS, whose programming decisions are dominated by corporate sponsors, not viewer subscribers--is almost perfect when it comes to excluding any kind of information from the outside world that might cast doubt on our dominant ideological consensus. Here are just a few examples:

• 
  
• Sixty-plus years of conservative attacks on the welfare state are based on claims that taxes are far too high and government far too big, resulting in a terrible burden on the economy, while far too much is given away to the undeserving poor, undermining their independence and drive to succeed. Even the slightest acquaintance with the reality of Europe's experience during this period would make every element of this attack utterly laughable. European taxes are far higher than ours, governments are larger, economies have grown faster (recovering from virtually total destruction in WWII), more has been spent on social programs, and the number of poor is far less than in America.
  
  See, for example, Luxembourg Income Study Working Papers #188: Do Social-Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment by Lane Kenworthy, #157: American Income Inequality In A Cross-National Perspective: Why Are We So Different? by Timothy M. Smeeding, and # 154: Empirical Evidence on Income Inequality in Industrialized Countries by Peter Gottschalk and Timothy M. Smeeding, available at LIS/LES Working Papers list
  
  
• When health care was debated in the early 1990s, there was barely a peep about government-financed single-payer systems, even though European (as well as Canadian) variations of this approach produce healthier, more long-lived populations at substantially lower costs.
  
  [ See official OECD statistics in Table 1: Premature mortality in OECD countries, 1995, and trends 1960-1995 and Table 2. Total Expenditure on Health, 1996 and trends 1976-1996 ]
  
  
• Death penalty advocates constantly claim it's necessary as a deterrent. But European nations have virtually eliminated the death penalty, and have much lower murder rates than we do.
  
  For example, German and American Prosecutions: An Approach to Statistical Comparison a Bureau of Justice Discussion Paper, February 1998, NCJ-166610, by Floyd Feeney, University of California at Davis School of Law, states: "The number of serious crimes reported to the police per 100,000 persons is much higher in the United States than in Germany. Five murders and forcible rapes and three or four robberies and felony assaults are reported in the United States per 100,000 population for every one in Germany."
  
  
• Drug war advocates constantly claim that stiff penalties are absolutely necessary, and that drug decriminalization would inundate us in a sea of drugs. But the European experience shows just the opposite: The Netherlands, which has taken drug decriminalization the farthest, has a much smaller drug problem than the U.S.
  
  Is Dutch drug policy the Devil? by Craig Reinarman and Peter Cohen reports that in the U.S., the latest National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 32.9% of the population had tried" marijuana, compared to 15.6% of the Dutch population. The U.S. makes nearly 700,000 arrests a year for marijuana offenses. In the Netherlands marijuana has legally available for many years.
  
  

In short, Limbaugh is an NAB Hate Radio Olympic Champion because he crystalizes everything the NAB specifically and the coporate media generally is trying to get us to believe. It's no accident that he's received the honors he has. Like all the othe NAB Hate Radio Olympic Champions, his distinctive mixture of hate and lies povides a fascinating--and appalling--microcosm of everything that the NAB stands for...or more accurately, everything it stoops to in its betrayal of the public trust that is the public airwaves.