Rush Limbaugh is to politics, what the WWF is to sports. He is just a joke that a lot of people don’t get.
Moving this to Cafe Society.
I have noticed, though, that if Limbaugh gets something right his dittoheads call and give praise for his accuracy, but when he screws up, suddenly he is an “entertainer”.
Stephe96 said
Yes, anybody in the news business can and probably often does make mistakes. That said however, the fact that this story was discredited and two producers were fired over it speaks directly to what it means to be a credible news source. You don’t have to get it right every time, but you do have to try. I don’t know much about Limbaugh but I’ve never heard that he or anybody on his staff was fired or even mildly nonplussed over his repeating of (based on the examples cited above) clearly made up or obviously erroneous information.
Despite his declarations of being just an entertainer, there are plenty of folks out there who truly do consider him as a valid source of information – unlike Jon Stewart. Or is it just that folks on the left are smart enough to identify a lie (joke?) when they hear one?
My brother takes him very seriously. But he’s the only one I know personally who does.
The fact that the producers were fired for the false report is a strong point in CNN’s favor. How many Limbaugh staff have been fired (or even disciplined) for playing fast and loose with the facts?
As for CNN, Rather and Brokaw not being held to the same standard, they ARE held to the same standard. If they weren’t, these firings never would have happened. If anything, their standards are higher.
It’s ludicrous to compare CNN, Rather, and Brokaw to Limbaugh. Those are news releated. Limbaugh never claims to be news. He’s a talk show host.
I listen to him daily at lunch time. He’s entertaining. If you rely on him for news, then you are in trouble. If you rely on any one outlet to get your information, then you are in trouble.
For him to cause this much ruckus among the left, he must be doing something right.
Count Reeson makes a very strong point, and one I hadn’t thought of.
“Rush Limbaugh is to politics, what the WWF is to sports.”
It’s an excellent analogy. It’s not really professional sports, any more than Rush is professional news or professional commentary. It’s fake from beginning to end, but a lot of people take it very seriously, and hold a firm belief that it’s all quite real.
In fact, there’s a considerable overlap in the demographics of both groups of fans.
I would not agree that Rush is a “joke,” though.
Pro wrestling never encouraged anyone to vote against their own best interests, nor did it ever spread disinformation or outright lies about various groups or individuals. It has encouraged hate on occasion, but only against individual wrestlers, and only because they’re supposed to be the bad guys, and the wrestlers in question knew this when they agreed to put on the Nazi helmets or the turbans or whatever…
Well, I suspect that if I had my own radio show, and a substantial audience of listeners, and I made a great many untrue statements that attacked and undermined the Right, the Right might well be a little hacked off about it, don’cha think? Particularly if I plainly intended those untrue statements to be taken as fact by my listeners.
Hell, the National Enquirer does much the same thing, and is routinely debunked by (and hated by) a great many people, for much the same reasons. The only difference is that the Enquirer doesn’t push any given political agenda.
**Uh, a lot of Limbaugh’s mistakes hardly seem unintentional. Ever hear Tom Brokaw accidently say that nicotine isn’t addictive and that cigarettes don’t cause disease? **
Uh, the point is that Brokaw has biases and makes mistakes, but they are different ones. For example, repeating discredited stories about guns, poor fact checking on matters of economics, biased reporting on the military, etc.
But in any event, better counterparts to Limbaugh would be people like Bill Maher, Michael Moore, and Phil Donaldson. And have you heard any of them lately? They’re bloody nuts. Donaldson in particular is raving like a madman, and his rants bear only a passing resemblance to the truth.
Limbaugh, I believe, at least tries to be accurate. But jeez, the guy doesn’t shut his blowhole for three hours straight, five days a week. Let’s see you try that and have everything that comes out of your mouth be completely error-free. That his critics can only find a dozen or so errors in 15 years of non-stop talking is pretty good.
I would put Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh in the same category – that is, political entertainers. They’re both fun to listen to and both stretch facts to meet their preconcieved notions.
They’ve both got armies of people though, who don’t understand this entertainment bit (which Rush does actually claim to be. Moore, on the other hand…) and treat everything as fact. I’m constantly amazed that people are proud to be “Dittoheads”. Its like saying “Hi! Tell me what to think!” Scary stuff.
I think that in his first few years, Rush had some things to say, but somewhere along the way, he quit doing his research and quit thinking. I am a child of the Reagan years and a Reagan Republican, and the conclusion I draw every time that I hear Rush on the radio now days is that he is completely uninformed and would not know logic if it bit him in the cigar.
The last time I listened, which was a month or so ago, a caller said that animals did not feel pain like humans do and there was no proof they did, and then went on about animal rights activists. Rush did not even challenge his statement, even though it was about as moronic a statement as I have ever heard uttered on the radio.
Rush has lost his edge, which I guess is to be expected when you start becoming a celebrity making a whole whole whole lot of money. Frankly, the blustering he does about his intelligence and his unassailable correctness has always been tiring, but is unbearably so when he doesn’t even try to make sense. It has gotten to the point of being sad.
I think he has some interesting insights on the political process and the behind the scenes sparring that goes on, but that’s about it. I wish he would convert to being a Democrat, because the conservative Republicans sure don’t need him. Dittohead? More like Butthead.
So the short answer to the question is No, I don’t take him seriously.
Quote from that “fair.org” link:
This is patently untrue. I’ve listened to Rush off-and-on for almost 10 years now. (I am not one of those people who constantly agree with him either, I’m libertarian and he’s waaaaay too socially conservative for me.) Rush will take any number of calls over the course of the week with people who voice a disagreement, or an alternate way of looking at a scenario. Rush may only get one or two really adverse callers per week on the show, but it’s not because of his call-screeners. He tells his call-screeners to find articulate people who will argue with him, because it’s more interesting and entertaining to argue than to hear some 40-year-old woman say “Dittos, Rush, you’re absolutely right about everything,” and because it saves him from having to fill more airtime with monologue. When he does manage to get an adverse caller who will disagree with him, he usually keeps the guy on the air for MUCH longer than any other sort of caller, he will carry the caller over breaks (which he rarely does for anybody else) and use most of his call time that hour on that person.
(BTW, look at some of the headlines on www.fair.org, and you’ll see they’re not really being impartial despite their name. You’ll see headline about Lott’s “latest endorsement of racism”, clearly characterizing earlier of Lott’s statements as endorsing racism as well as this one. If they want fairness and accuracy, why not leave the clip to be interpreted by the people, why characterize it? There’s also a piece criticizing NBC for “slamming” universal health care. There’s a leftist bent to that page just in the choice of words and choice of topics, if nothing else.)
If you picture yourself back in 1992 when he really started to become popular, you can see what Rush does. He takes news and politics and packages them in a way that people enjoy listening to them. Back then, the only newschannel was the mostly drab and dull CNN. Thought-provoking news analysis was limited to 30 minutes of ABC’s Nightline and 30 minutes of CNN’s Crossfire. At least with Rush, people are paying attention to the issues for longer than just a half-hour at the dinner table. And it keeps people informed at least in a general sense as to what’s going on. If it’s politics and it’s newsworthy, Rush will bring it up. If he throws in his own spin on it, people can still get the “impartial” version of it in the ABC newsbreaks at :30 and :00 throughout the show (most talk-radio stations that build around rush are old newsradio stations that have national affiliations to ABC or another major network.)
And check out this fair.org link: http://www.fair.org/media-beat/021212.html
Sounds exactly like GD poster Chumpsky, who we’d all agree is an left-wing ideologue. What “fairness” or “accuracy” are they trying to promote here? All I see is another .org website pushing it’s obvious political agenda.
My brother takes Rush seriously. It’s getting to be exhausting, correcting all his misconceptions.
To give you an idea of what I’m dealing with: last time I saw him, my brother told me that “the government should defend the borders, and maintain the highways, and that’s it.” Of course, when I reminded him that his wife and son moved to Wisconsin (he’s going soon, too) to take advantage of free government services to help his son’s autism, his explanation was, “but that’s just matching, half of the funds come from a private grant.” Ah, so that somehow makes up for the other half. sheesh…
FWIW, Rex, one of my roommates in college listened to rush, circa 1992-1994, and of all the dozens of sessions I overheard, I only recall hearing two adverse callers in total, and one of them was cut off much earlier than the dittoheads.
He was entertaining back then, not due to his commentary, but his skits. They were much funnier than Leno, on the average, but thats not saying much.
Nowadays, he’s just a pompous “donkey” (elephant?)
Rush is harmless to folks who understand that he only provides entertainment, every time I have managed to sit through his crap show he does (some minor variation of) the following:
“we are going to discuss the FACTS of this issue, can you believe the size of his nose”, and I am always left wondering where the FACTS were, to quote Letterman “he is a bag of hot gas”.
unclviny
Why is FAIR concerned with Limbaugh? He’s not part of the “reporting” media. He’s a talk show host. Do they investigate Michael Moore and his falsehoods?
Ludovic: I listen to Rush rarely (and not for a couple of years now), but when I’d listen I found that not only did he allow dissenting viewpoints, he’d encourage them. And he’d let them speak, too. I remember during the Clinton years one caller who Limbaugh debated with so long that they went to commercial three times while the guy was on the phone.
Give Limbaugh his due. You don’t have to like him, and you for sure don’t have to agree with him. I don’t, on many many issues. But if you compare him to his peers (Donahue, Larry King, Bill oReilly, Michael Moore, etc) Limbaugh is at least as accurate as any of them, and in my opinion he is fairer than all the ones I mentioned.
What turns people off is that he acts so *certain about his beliefs, and brags about how right he is. That’s certainly annoying. But that doesn’t mean he’s a liar and doesn’t allow dissenting viewpoints.
As a young punk (say, 9th and 10th grades), I was a Limbaugh-conservative. Reformed now, thank god.
I read both of his books and listened to his show when I could. At the time, it seemed like he was making ironclad arguments, and you’d have to be biased almost to the point of being delusional to miss the obvious truth in what he was saying. That’s how he tended to frame his arguments, too (though not so explicitly, of course).
I flip through those books now and am simply shocked – one specious “argument” after another. If you want to listen to Rush for entertainment purposes, that’s one thing – he’s a competent radio personality. Please, though, do me a favor: don’t ever, ever, ever get your facts from Rush Limbaugh.
As an aside: say what you will about the source, but Al Franken simply destroyed Limbaugh’s chapter (in TWTOTB) on Reagonomics. His twisting of statistics crosses the line separating “spin” from “lies,” IMO.
You are misinterpreting what I said.
My point in that thread was that many Democrats make the dangerous assumption that no one takes Limbaugh seriously. That is a mistake. Hordes of people do take Limbaugh seriously, and Democrats would be wise not to dismiss him out of hand.
Instead, they need to produce a radio host of their own, who can do battle on the same terms (minus the outright slander that mars Limbaugh’s show).