Reminds me of a poll of, I believe, high school students. A shockingly high number agreed with the statement “The government should be allowed to censor newspapers”.
Eternal vigilance, indeed.
God do I feel old. I used to have to keep my fcc license on me, instead of leaving it at the station, because I worked on the campus radio station and at the local station.
And now self-described ‘people who have read a lot about media’ have never even heard of these licenses.
The CNN poll is stupid. I bet if you clarified with, “do you think the FCC or some other government agency should remove him, or do you mean he should be dropped by his subscriber stations?” you’d see not so many people wishing for the government to do something. At least I hope.
Who gives a fuck?
This is just people voicing their displeasure with Rush through a poll that means fuck-all. Let me know when people are actually trying to get free speech banned, not just clicking their mouse once to say “fuck you” to a douchebag.
What about the one person, who is presumably smart enough to become an editor at CNN thinking this crap question is worthy of a poll?
Of course Rush shouldn’t be banned from the airwaves. He is welcome to make a fool of himself for as long as advertisers are willing to cough up money to pay the bills for his show. (Easy to say that at a time when advertisers are falling over each other in the rush to pull their ads from his show. :))
However, he should IMHO be pulled from Armed Forces Radio. I understand that they want to include a range of viewpoints, but they should find someone to broadcast similar views, but minus the hate, bullying, and general assholishness. And if they can’t find someone who can do that, then maybe that general POV is inseparable from those repugnant characteristics, and should therefore be pulled from AF Radio.
Shamed off the radio would be nice.
Banned. No,
I can follow the argument that leaves Rush alone in favor of supporting the larger cause of freedom of speech. But is there nothing that can be done when someone abuses a public speaking position by knowingly spreading falsehoods & half-truths in order to needlessly enflame the masses? This troll would absolutely love to cause a “Martians are invading”-level panic in the political arena, and it’s simply counterproductive. If he were focusing on uncofortable truths that would be one thing, but is it really ok for him to take things so far out of context he’s essentially making shit up?
Have you seen the sort of polls they have on CNN (or indeed pretty much any network)? “Quality control” is not a high priority as long as it collects data on the people who sign in to vote and fills a few minutes of air time. They’d do a poll on “which kitten is cutest” if they could link it to the news somehow.
And I still have my radio operators license card from, let’s see, 1993. Long expired, but then I haven’t been on the air since Christmas 1995.
Like hell it isn’t political.
“Free speech for me, but not for thee.” As always.
Regards,
Shodan
I actually think this is right. People use polls to express thumbs up or thumbs down. For example, I think the relatively low job approval ratings Obama was getting last year was more an indication that people weren’t happy about the state of the economy than any real displeasure about what Obama was actually doing.
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I’m above the “sheeple” who want to ban people they don’t like from the airwaves, absolutely. I hate Limbaugh, I think he’s a critical-mass level douche, but I’m sure some people hate some the stuff I like too and would like to ban it.
I agree. That was a pretty disingenuous statement.
Also, i wonder whether people who make this argument about complaining to the FCC ever stop and think about the broader implications. If all it took to have a station’s license revoked were a few thousand or a few hundred thousand complaints, we could end up in a situation whereby just about any station, whatever its politics, could be removed from the air by a motivated and targeted campaign.
Annoy the liberal feminists? They’ll rally their supporters to have your broadcast license removed. Annoy the fundamentalist Christians? They’ll send word through their church networks and complain until you’re taken off the air. Anger the gun lobby? The NRA will send a letter out to members telling them to complain that you’re not fulfilling your responsibilities as a broadcaster.
It’s pretty easy to imagine the sort of chilling effects this sort of special-interest campaign could have on free speech if it could relatively easily result in the loss of a broadcast license. It could also quickly become a sort of escalating war—you got one of “our” stations off the air, so now we’re going after one of “yours”—that would be carried out without regard for actual quality, and only to promote a political agenda.
I imagine most of the respondents mean his broadcasters should get rid of him, not that the government should ban him.
The question in the poll was, “Should Rush Limbaugh be banned from public airwaves?”
It wasn’t “Should Rush Limbaugh’s current employers fire him?” or “Should radio stations refuse to run Rush Limbaugh’s show?”
Your faith in the CNN poll-voting public is really sweet.
Agree, but I have my doubts that the difference is understood by a large number of that 46% (or whatever it was). We don’t sm to be a populace of startling intelligence and the ability to see shades of meaning. 
The point was that people don’t care what the actual language of the poll was, but that they simply used the opportunity to express displeasure with Rush. Some people even lie in polls, just to screw things up a bit. If the poll had any actual real world consequences, they might ponder the specifics a bit more carefully. I don’t think we should conclude that a large percentage of CNN viewers would support government banning of a radio host. (However, I will admit the number is probably greater than zero, and that is troubling)
To say it’s political implies that there is a political party that endorses what Rush says. I think they were trying to give the GOP a pass, here. You can be a conservative, rock-solid Republican and find what he said over the line.
This thread seems to assume that there is an entire political party or other large group of people that is 100% in Rush’s corner on this one. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
I think that is too broad to be true. I cannot be the only person who thinks Rush Limbaugh is a vile jackass but who also think that it would be wrong for the government to force him off the air. Not only would it not work because he could just podcast but doing something like that gives credence to the idea that the United States media is controlled by liberals and so doing it is counterproductive. The best thing to do to deal with Rush is what is already happening. His horrible words are costing him advertisers but more importantly people are countering his bile with truth.
And therein lies a big problem with American political discourse. Too many mouthbreathers think that things are somehow only political if they are party political. In the minds of these people, if you can’t identify a position or an issue specifically with either the Democrats or the Republicans, then that position or issue is therefore not political.
This is a profoundly wrongheaded way to think about politics. Furthermore, this is something that people like Fonda and Steinem should be well aware of. These two women were central figures in the feminist movement that made a slogan out of the phrase “The personal is political.”
Fonda and Steinem would never argue that things like sexual equality and reproductive freedoms are not political issues, so they should also be well aware that concerns about freedom of expression, and calls for government to intervene in order to restrict it, are also political.
To be honest, while i’m not interested in having Limbaugh shut down, i don’t think we should give a pass to the Republican Party on this issue.
The GOP has shown itself perfectly willing to ride the wave of Limbaugh’s popularity when it’s convenient, and it’s also clear that a not-insignificant number of Republican voters are perfectly fine with what he said. Limbaugh isn’t an official part of the GOP, and you don’t have to be a Republican to listen to him, but to ignore the massive overlap between his audience, Republican policies, and Republican voters is to ignore reality.
No-one ever assumed any such thing, but just because the number isn’t 100% doesn’t mean that Rush doesn’t have a large number of supporters. There are still millions of people who listen to his show, even after this incident. And those supporters, by and large, are conservatives, and i’ll bet that at least 98% of them vote Republican.