February 22, 2024 • 50 mins
Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to help put our present politics into historical context.
In the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh transformed talk radio. In the process, he radicalized his listeners and the conservative movement. Limbaugh’s talk radio style became a staple of the modern right. Then, the left joined the fray. This week: partisan loudmouth versus partisan loudmouth, and the shifting media landscape that helped create modern political warfare.
This episode first ran in June, 2021.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. I promise not to get too technical with you,
but bear with me for a second. I am speaking
to you now through an electro voice ARI twenty microphone.
It's black with a mesh cap at the top, kind
of clunky, very eighties looking. It's pretty weighty. I think
(00:36):
if you clubbed someone with it, you could probably knock
them unconscious. Same deal if you just talk real slow
and boring. Some people, people who spend all their time
thinking about recording equipment, think it sounds honky in the parlance.
I'm not entirely sure what that means. In any way,
I like it. My Ari twenty, however, is not gold plated.
(00:56):
But today on the show, we have the story of
somebody who's was Rush Limbaugh is probably the most famous
conservative talk radio host of the twentieth and twenty first century.
He was a larger than life personnel, and he contributed
a whole lot to the hyper partisan, hyper polarized media
landscape we live in today. Making the story you're about
(01:17):
to hear, we listened to a lot of Rush limbat tape,
and when you listen to enough of it, you begin
to feel his voice like it's hammering into your skull.
Whatever you think of the man's politics. He was an
all time Hall of Fame shock chock. He was very,
very good at his job. When he really wanted to
make a point, he'd lean in really close to the
microphone like this. It's called eating the microphone. Well, the
(01:41):
episode I'm about to play you is about how that
gold plated microphone eight American politics. Since the beginning of radio,
people have worried about its power. On the radio, millions
of people can hear a single voice all at the
same time, with sound effects and on scene reporting, radio
could put images and ideas into the listener's mind, your mind.
(02:04):
People thought it was so powerful it could be a
great tool for democracy, a way to educate everyone in
the country. But if radio was that powerful, couldn't it
be a tool for totalitarianism and groupthink. In nineteen thirty three,
Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Gerbels wrote, the German radio, under
national socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct
(02:25):
instrument for educating and restructuring the German nation end quote.
In the US people were worried about that version of
the radio, so they made laws and rules and norms
to keep it at bay, the fairness doctrine, equal time.
Those were some of them. But surveying the last one
hundred years of media history, you might get the feeling
(02:46):
that fairness and equality haven't really been the trajectory. This
episode looks at what went wrong with the media and
politics and points to the history of the moment we're
in now, where it seems as if every American lives
in his or her own version of reality. From our
second season, recorded back in twenty twenty one, Here's hush Rush.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
There's a place in our world where the known things go.
A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves cluttered with proof. Inside.
I've been cataloging my collection of evidence about propagandists, hypnotists
and conspiracy theorists, labeling reels with masking tape and sharpies,
(03:28):
organizing them by date, reel after reel of tape. It's
like the Nixon Novle Office in here, recordings of the
sorts of people we've been listening to all season, episode
after episode.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Your command of whole life in the months of worldwide lungfuls.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
The man who makes his living by telling the truth, the.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
Man who I got to say.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
I want you to keep on going back and back
and back in your mind, the wall of secrecy, the
news media being silent, and the Patsy's locked up, and
the psychological profile.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Robert Ripley, access Sally, Maury Bernstein, May Brussel, Valentine, Yeah, boys,
Kaya and I I mean, each of them asking you,
the listener, to doubt what you think you know, and
very often that doubt is delivered through the medium of radio.
(04:26):
I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
the rest, all balled up together.
Speaker 6 (04:32):
You are, my.
Speaker 7 (04:32):
Friends, about to be exposed to the kind of bristling,
cogent analysis available nowhere else. Because of this, your initial
reaction may be shock and disbelief.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
That's the voice of mister Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jill Lapour,
host of a show that could hardly be more different
from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Welcome to the Last Archive,
the show about how we know what we know and
why sometimes it seems lately as if we don't know
anything at all. Step over the threshold and along the
passage of time to the year nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Don't fight it, don't even try. Just surrender yourself.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Surrender yourself that's his mantra, it's not mine. My mantra
is never surrender. What's the first thing you do when
you get in the car, Collect the seatbelt, switch on
the ignition, Turn on the radio. Yeah, find the right station.
(05:33):
Here's a little there you want there, jingle one gracious Roman.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Her just say times.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Carry radios first became common in the nineteen thirties. For
decades radio was am radio, local stations, maybe with some
top of the hour news and a lot of sports.
Speaker 8 (06:06):
Baseball.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
You by the first bag of the bank of since
that or your money grows safely and high return certificates
of the body.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Something else that had long been popular on AM radio
gospel shows.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
The voice of the Hour of Decision, Billy Graham, So
for you, for the nation, this is the Hour of Decision.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
By the nineteen seventies, the most popular AM radio shows
were drivetime shows, the ones that aired during your commute.
Rock and Roll hosted by fast talking djsk.
Speaker 10 (06:43):
Nine oh three and fourteen k on the award winning
Ye Rock Game.
Speaker 11 (06:47):
Roll Over the show with Bunny and Product for all
some of you, no doubts, no wondering, one award.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
I have won.
Speaker 7 (06:52):
I'll tell you not out of the Marconia Warren More
Textlent Rock Kennery, that.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Young Boogaroo, that's the young Rush Limbaugh. Jeff Christy, this
is non to radio backs in.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Boy, congratulate our name and acclaiment winners.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
Jeff round With of Eastmont.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
I'll tell you, Jem I will think you twelve six
packs of Carefree sugarlist gun to get to it all day.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Limbaugh was born in Missouri. He went to Southeast Missouri
State University for a year, but dropped out to work
in radio. In nineteen seventy one, he got a job
as a disc jockey at an AM station outside Pittsburgh.
He got fired after a year and a half and
went to a station called.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
Kqv And that one time made the twelve more entries
for you in the Camfree Rock Concert contrast.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
You and Jack Box for Tomorrow is.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
Two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen sent the lot
of guys that you can remember it. Bob deccannell makes
the next.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Call the one.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Limbaugh died in twenty twenty one at the age of seventy.
His obituaries head headlines like We're living in the world.
Rush Limbaugh created and that's true. But even though you
may think you know all the ways we now live
in Rush Limbaugh's world, there's more to understand. It has
to do with what a lot of this season has
(08:03):
been exploring how we hear voices on the radio. There
were lots of testimonials to Limbo after he died, but
one comment really stuck with me. A guy wrote on
YouTube his show was the only one that came in clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
So I listened.
Speaker 7 (08:20):
People are thinking of a Jefferson Startist show.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
Work of way details them.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Limbaugh even when he was Jeff Christi. He was a
big guy, wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality,
a little George Costanza meets Fred Flinstone. In nineteen seventy four,
he lost yet another job. He moved back home with
his parents in Missouri. He was twenty three. It was
a very tough time to try to make a career
in AM radio, mainly because FM radio was on the rise.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
FM radio a fight free static three FM or FM
stereo car radio. Child Survey It's out of silent day.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of Elvis the
Little Richard, people bought FM radios for their houses. But
the FMI I only really exploded in the nineteen seventies, when,
for the first time, you could get FM in your car.
At this point, AM radio was mono, just one track.
FM was stereo. It was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to
(09:25):
switch from plain old mono to stereo. He'd bring your
car into the shop and switch out your AM radio
for an FM radio with stereo speakers. Seem this change
in the sound of radio from AM to FM would
have vast repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very
(09:46):
long reverb, AM radio suffered, listenership plummeted, and then so
did AD revenue. By nineteen eighty seven, the majority of
AM radio stations were no longer making a profit, and
people who worked at AM radio stations in the nineteen
seventies were losing their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh,
(10:07):
who'd been moving from job to job had landed.
Speaker 12 (10:10):
All the DJs got fired.
Speaker 11 (10:12):
I was spared as assistant program director, and you know
what that meant, programming the automation machine.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Limba didn't last long as an assistant program director. He
took a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
AM radio stations were beginning to figure out that if
they could leave music to the FM band and concentrate
on talk shows, they could start making money again. In
mono talk sounds fine, even if you might not agree
with what someone's saying.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
The simple fact matter is that the homeless advocacy in
this country is, I think, based upon fraud.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name, Limbaugh
started a new kind of talk radio show in Sacramento
on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Soon he had a deal for national syndication.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
The opinions expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program did not
necessarily reflect those of WABC Radio or its management, and
now here's Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 7 (11:15):
Either way. That's a Gutlass disclaimer. The view is expressed
by the host of this show ought to become federal
law in the station and sponsors all who heartily endorse them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The Rush Limbaugh Show was a one way wall of talk.
Limbaugh was funny, he was angry. His program started with
a news digest, then a series of opinions mixed with
calls from listeners who agreed with those opinions. Year's voice now,
and it sounds so utterly familiar. That's because it's the
voice of the political YouTuber, or of a certain sort
(11:47):
of podcaster, brash, annoying, know it all. But it was
a new voice then, and it spoke to listeners for
three hours a day, five days a week.
Speaker 7 (11:58):
So to give you just a bit of an idea
about the show, there are no guests never. We don't
talk about single issues or themes unless they evolve as
the program goes. It is pretty much an open line
discussion each and every day.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Limba revolutionized radio open line. It was all him, even
some of the ads. At a time when human resources
departments were newly requiring sexual harassment training, Limbaugh spent a
lot of his time on air attacking feminists, especially after
Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
(12:41):
Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
give you two glorious nyems for an Anita Hell.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Trading cards have always been for males only.
Speaker 9 (12:50):
It's just not fair, It's not right. Damn I spilt
ill past my Betty freedan.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Feminazi cards are designed with a woman in mind.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I'll up front, I remember in those years my dad
listening to Limba, who drove my mother nuts. I bet
a lot of families had an experience like that. Limba.
He'd say it seemed anything, so partly people tuned in
for the thrill of it, to hear what he'd say next.
For the rest of us, though, it was like getting
kicked in the face every day. He went after feminists,
(13:17):
He liked to mock environmentalists, gays and lesbians. He made
a lot of jokes about aides. Despite or really because
of all that, Limbo's audience just grew and grew. Mainly
that audience was men, white men who were angry. As
angry as Rush seemed to be real. Wages for white
men who had gone to college were dropping. They're still dropping.
(13:39):
Some of these guys really did have a lot to
be angry about. Rush told them who to be angry at.
The people who loved Rush. They called themselves dittoheads because
they believed everything he said and would say it back ditto.
Limbo's format, the wall of Talk pushed nearly everything else
off talk radio, all the kooky chit chat and cooking
(14:03):
shows and carpentry shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations,
which for a long time time had been mom and
pop operations, were getting bought out by giant, consolidated, national,
and even global corporations. Here I've got to disclose something
about that consolidation. The Rush Limbaugh Show was eventually syndicated
(14:24):
by an outfit called clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel
rebranded itself as iHeart Media, and an arm of iHeart
now sells ads for Pushkin Industries, which is the production
house that makes the last Archive. So this is like
when the Washington Post reports on Amazon and then has
to mention that the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Okay,
(14:44):
the last Archive is not the Washington Post, and iHeart
doesn't own Pushkin. But still it's important to disclose these things.
Limbaugh liked to present himself as a cowboy, a maverick, bold, reckless,
and unpredictable. In reality, he was more like the Wonderbread
of radio, the factory made whitebread of radio, who was
the same every goddamn day, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
(15:07):
ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
five days a week. But the forces that had to
do with Limbaugh's success had to do with more than
just radio formats. For years, Limbaugh's fortunes rose while other
medias fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
(15:32):
didn't seem to mind.
Speaker 7 (15:35):
If you listened to this show every day, you never
need to read another newspaper again, never read on a magazine.
I do it for you, and you get a bonus.
I tell you what to think about this incredibly complicated
and controversial issue.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I tell you what to think. And he wasn't joking.
Limba presented himself as a prophet liberals and Feminazis, they
were heretics. Limba was talking politics, but his show was
less like a news program than like those old radio
gospel shows. Politics as preaching, listening as worship, conservatism as
a new religion. Scholars call this called sectarianism, and in
(16:11):
this era, sectarianism was headed to Washington.
Speaker 12 (16:15):
At gopack, our mission is to gain control of the
US House of Representatives.
Speaker 13 (16:20):
We're developing a farm team of future congressional candidates.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
That's audio from what's known as a go Pack tape,
one of the thousands of tapes made by a GOP
political action committee that had become the mouthpiece for just
one man.
Speaker 13 (16:34):
This is Congress and Nude Gingrich. As a candidate, you've
probably been listening to tapes from gopack all year, and
you know that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain
basic approaches.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia. Gingrich heard what
Limbaugh was doing on air, and in the late nineteen
eighties started to record his own version of that format
through these go pack cassette tapes. If you were a
Republican running for office or working on a campaign, you'd
probably listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
Speaker 13 (17:04):
In this tape, we have a speech I gave to
the Republicans in California. We decided to share with you
as an example of how you can bring all the
basic values together.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
This is the sound of modern political history, shifting gears
and burning out the clutch. The tapes were mailed to
thousands of people every month. One Republican from Minnesota told
PBS's Frontline how crucial they were when.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
They would come.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
I mean, and you spent some time in a car,
particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
When they would come in the mail.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
I mean I would open them up right away, and
I would put them in a cassette player within twenty
four hours.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
The purpose of the tapes was to create a single
national message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads.
Speaker 13 (17:52):
There are two movements in America. There's a left wing
radical movement, and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority,
the basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of
how we think you can draw those lines.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Gingrich proposed a set of dualisms for candidates to use
in ads. You might think this kind of hyper polarized
rhetoric is more recent, a product of social media, maybe,
but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 13 (18:18):
We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
allowing honest citizens stone guns. The radical left introduced to
build a legalize sex with animals, but we oppose legal
sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
of sex with animals.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
In the early nineteen nineties, and a memo sent out
with the tapes, go Back supplied candidates with a vocabulary list.
It suggested words to use to help define your campaign change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
hard work, initiative, common sense.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Go Peck also listed words to use to describe your
political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
Lie, shallow, traders, sensationalists, in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
This was political warfare on all fronts. Gingrich trained the officers,
Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingrich's political power grew, and so
did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
In nineteen ninety one, Limba appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
What are you trying to do with this show?
Speaker 7 (20:04):
I'm trying to attract the largest audience I can and
hold it for as long as I can so that
I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertiser rates. This is a business.
Speaker 11 (20:13):
You're in it for the money.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
Sure, of course, I'm doing a lot of this for money.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
That's Limbaugh earning points for being honest. It's also a tactic.
Donald Trump would adopt honesty about loving money. Listeners adored it.
For talk radio, the money came rolling in, and not
just for Limbaugh. Between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety four,
an average of twenty new talk radio stations went into
business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
(20:45):
not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners.
Speaker 14 (20:52):
No sports, no back, no information for mindless shatter your station.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
Kay BBL Talk Radio on Alice Springfield's papered conservative and
author of the well selling book Only Turkeys Have Left Wings,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Speaker 8 (21:04):
Birch Barlow.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
the Simpsons.
Speaker 7 (21:09):
Good morning, fellow freedomlikers, Birch Barlow, the fourth branch of government,
the fifty first State.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
The more famous Limbaugh got, the more worried observers got,
especially about how he talked about talk, how he talked
about the freedom of speech, how he talked about fairness itself.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
This is also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator.
There is no First Amendment here except for me.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, right, the First Amendment only constrains the government, not
a privately owned radio station. But for most of the
twentieth century there'd been some rules in place, rules that
date to a time when people understood just how dangerous
radio could be if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties,
(21:59):
a guy named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from
President Roosevelt. Derr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best
known to history for something he did much later in
the nineteen fifty when he and his wife bailed Rosa
Parks out of jail. Anyway, in nineteen forty one, FDR
appointed Dr to the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, and
(22:20):
I said, what was that? The FCC is the federal
agency that regulates who can get broadcast licenses to use
the airwaves, which after all, belonged to the public.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
When I went on to the FCAC, I knew absolutely
nothing about it. But at the time, we will monitor
all the access broadcast.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I did an episode earlier this season called The Inner Front.
It talks about how the US government monitored Radio Berlin
and Radio Tokyo. That was part of the FCC's job
during the Second World War, but the content of those
enemy broadcasts really changed how Durer and the FCC thought
about the power of radio.
Speaker 6 (23:00):
My god, this is a terrific medium. The other can
be magnificent. I can completely ruin you if you've got
this thing in the wrong hands. So then Adam again
to take a more place to look at an American broadcast.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
The FCC started enforcing some rules that were on the
books but that have been mostly ignored, and Der's influence
would lead to a new rule that would shape broadcasting
for the next half century. In nineteen forty nine, the
FCC established what became known as the Fairness doctrine.
Speaker 9 (23:34):
Under the American system of broadcasting, the individual licensees of
radio stations have the responsibility for determining the specific program
material to be broadcast over their stations.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So you could broadcast whatever you wanted.
Speaker 9 (23:47):
Except This choice, however, must be exercised in a manner
consistent with the basic policy of the Congress that radio
be maintained as a medium of free speech for the
general public as a whole, rather than as an outlet
for the purely personal or private interests of the licensee.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
The fairness doctrine is about the public interest. It says
the government has an interest in what radio is dinations broadcast.
It says that on the issues of the day, radio
stations have to broadcast more than one view.
Speaker 9 (24:16):
This requires that licensees devote a reasonable percentage of their
broadcast time to the discussion of public issues of interest
in the community served by their stations, and that such
programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable
opportunity to hear different opposition positions.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
In the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by
way of congressional action, and the Johnson administration added a
guarantee for a right of reply after a criticism during
a broadcast. It wasn't often enforced, but it did happen sometimes,
like when Medgar Evers once got seventeen minutes of airtime
(24:55):
to respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when
conservatives attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test ban treaty, stations were
required to play a pro test ban speech by the
president himself. This was exact bactly the kind of thing
that ticked conservatives off. Rules that required listeners to hear
more from Edgar Evers hear more from President Kennedy.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
All mankind has been struggling to escape from the dockning
prospect of mash destruction on Earth.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Supreme Court affirmed much of
the Fairness Doctrine, but conservatives are getting more and more
peeved about it, believing that the Fairness Doctrine suppressed conservative views.
By the nineteen eighties, they really wanted to get rid
of it, and it was vulnerable because it was a regulation,
not a law. In nineteen eighty five, a new FCC
head appointed by President Reagan said he would fight to
(25:50):
end the Fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Congress passed a bill that would have established the doctrine
as law, but Reagan vetoed it and Congress didn't have
the votes to override his veto. The doctrine was.
Speaker 9 (26:04):
Dead, and now here's Russe Limbaugh.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Limbaugh could not have operated if the Fairness Doctrine had
still been in place, at least not without worrying that
the FCC might come after him because he used his
airtime to promote partisanship. In fact, he was more than
a partisan. Limbaugh wanted to be a king Maker. In
nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan failed
to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
(26:37):
But when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Limbaugh sounded a
battle cry. He made it his mission to take down
the Clintons, both of them.
Speaker 7 (26:46):
The Clintons are running around on this national tour. Now,
you know, I don't know how else to say this.
I mean, the president gets away when he says something
it isn't true later being told about, Oh yeah, I
was an inadvertent statement. The motto of this administration every
day is what can we do to fool him? Today?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Bill Clinton, for sure did sometimes lie, no question, but
fooling people was not the motto of his administration. Clinton
got exasperated. You can hear him on Saint Louis AM
Radio practically begging for a rite of reply.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh,
I'll have three hours to say whatever he wants, and
I won't have any opportunity to respond. And there's no
truth detector. You won't get on afterwards and say what
was true and what was.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
In nineteen ninety three, Democrats in Congress tried to bring
back the fairness doctrine. Limbaugh like to call their effort
the hush rush Bill, but other people on talk radio
didn't see.
Speaker 5 (27:40):
It that way.
Speaker 12 (27:42):
I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
ninety three.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
I like it.
Speaker 12 (27:50):
I like the fact that we as broadcasters have to
be fair. It is not out to get any broadcast.
I know Rush Limbaugh thinks they're out to get them.
All it means is that a station who has if
you have eight right wing hosts, you better put some
left wing hosts on.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
I don't know what's wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
But the fairness doctrine was not reinstated, and in nineteen
ninety four, in the midterm elections, Republicans flipped the Senate
and the House. It was a wipeout. They took ten governorships,
they won state legislatures if they elected Newt Gingrich Speaker
of the House. The freshman Republicans in the House named
Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class, and he
(28:29):
went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged by reporters
asking him how talk radio had led the Conservatives to victory.
Speaker 7 (28:36):
These reporters who asked me questions about talk radio were
all trying to say, in a roundabout way, that I
took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to
mind numbed robots, and every day would send out code
in my show that would force them to march to
the polls on November the eighth of the poll the
(28:57):
lever I wanted them to poll.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Listening to Limbaugh's speech to the freshman Republican members of
the House, you can hear them giggling as Limbaugh turned
to a new topic, reports of secret meetings that Built
and Hillary Clinton were holding in the White House about me.
Speaker 7 (29:14):
They're trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
They're scouring America looking for some liberal.
Speaker 7 (29:21):
Host who can automatically end up on six hundred and
sixty radio stations.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
They think that they can.
Speaker 7 (29:27):
Just pluck some liberal out of the sky and put
him on the radio and create a bunch of liberal
mind numb robots.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Point taken Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numb robots.
But remember he asked his listeners to surrender to his
point of view, and millions of them did just that
you might not like the fairness doctrine. You might want
some other sort of guidelines or mechanisms in place, you
might want none at all. But whatever your view, you
(29:54):
still got to wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't
really work if people only listen to one kind of
political opinion all day, every day. Limbo was right about
one thing, though, in this era with the fairness doctrine dead,
some people really were looking for a liberal version of him,
not someone who would hush Rush, someone who would crush Rush.
Speaker 15 (30:15):
Hen you welcome me out, Franken, show, I'm out, Franken.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
The left answer to Rush Limba would be for a while,
this guy, Alan Stuart Franken, a comedian best known at
the time for his work on Saturday Night Live. Franken
had written a book called Rush Limbo Is a Big,
Fat Idiot and Other Observations. He came out in nineteen
ninety six. The audiobook version gives you an idea of
(30:40):
Franken's vibe at the time.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
I thought the title, aside from the obvious advantage of
being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books. Let me
explain why it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing
out that he's a big lard butt.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Franken told c SPAN he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite.
Speaker 10 (30:58):
If Rush Limbaugh were to write a book about you,
what would its title be?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Uh, The guy who got me, the guy who held
me accountable, the guy who my ass.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Franken owned his comedy style deadpan, a bit obnoxious, part
smart alec, part frat boy. Here he is talking to
an audience of college students.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
What I do is in propaganda.
Speaker 16 (31:25):
What I do is taking what they say and using
it against them.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
What I do is jiu jitsu.
Speaker 16 (31:34):
They say something ridiculous and then I subject them to
scorn and ridicule.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
That's my job.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Franken had a lot in common with Limbaugh. They were
both born in nineteen fifty one. They're both from the
middle of the country. Limba's from Missouri, Franken grew up
in Minnesota. They both love to perform. Then there are
the differences. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken graduated from Harvard.
The same year that Franken published Rush Limbaugh as a
Big fat Idiot, a new cable television network started up,
(32:05):
Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced. This was
the cable TV version of stuff that Limbaugh and Gingrich
had pioneered. Really, you can put everything on early Fox
News into one of two bins that first labeled Limbaugh,
the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limba, the more
(32:29):
professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the same in
the end, lots of opinion monologues getting viewers to distrust
other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile, talk radio
was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limba did a lot
of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC PMSNBC. He called
(32:52):
US News and World Report, US News, Meet the Press,
meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen ninety eight,
when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through the roof,
both for Fox News and for Talk radio.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
Bill Clinton got call Stumpen.
Speaker 11 (33:11):
Legan turn Monica Lewinsky the blue stain dress.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
All this time, and especially after nine to eleven, a
lot of liberals were still wishing there was a liberal Limbaugh,
so they started a new radio network called Air America.
Air America would launch all kinds of careers, including Rachel
Maddows before joining MSNBC. She had her own Air America show. Now,
(33:39):
Franken came to Air America from the USO. He'd been
going on tours entertaining the troops overseas Bob Hopestyle. He
saw that work as a chance to show that right
wingers didn't have a monopoly on patriotism. Franken, like all
of Air America, had the idea that left wing radio
would offer listeners the opposition positions that the fairness doctrine
would have required if it had still been in place,
(34:02):
though he didn't put it in such lofty terms.
Speaker 15 (34:05):
It's about.
Speaker 16 (34:08):
Answering these fuckheads that have been on the air and
lion and delivering this simplistic, black and white babble about
how the world works, as if they know something, and
they have built this infrastructure of feeding people misinformation about
(34:34):
economic justice and about how our society is run. And
it's about time that somebody fought back.
Speaker 17 (34:45):
Talk to me, talk about the right wing.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Dis honesty.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Franklin launched his own Air America radio show in two
thousand and four. He delivered something surprising, an old fashioned
variety show sort of Marx Brothers but about politics with
lots of skits.
Speaker 17 (35:09):
Show is brought to you by the Union of Jewish Archaeologists.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
We look at fossils of arightly Man and asked, was.
Speaker 8 (35:18):
This a Jew?
Speaker 2 (35:21):
What else Franken was doing was different from anything else
on the air, mostly though it was different from the
Rush Limbaugh Show. Everything about Franken Show was designed in
opposition to Limbaugh's show. Unlike Limbaugh, who only had guests occasionally,
Franken Show featured them, and unlike Limbaugh, Franken invited calls
from people who disagreed with him. When Franken did monologues,
(35:43):
he often got serious.
Speaker 17 (35:45):
In the early sixties, We'd watch TV. We watched the news,
maryor TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
southern sheriff's sicken police dogs on black demonstrators.
Speaker 14 (35:57):
Made that so that no Jew can be for that.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
The most important part of Franken Show came when he
fact checked the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Speaker 17 (36:04):
How many people listened to him Fifteen to twenty million, right, right, Okay,
so those people believe him, right, yeah, Okay, so most
of his listeners believe is seventy five percent people making
minimum wage are teenagers in their first job. I had
our staff look at up sixty one point one percent
of people earning minimum wage are twenty or over. You know,
(36:26):
we got our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
and he got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Frankn put on a good show, but Air America turned
out to be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run,
beset by financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for
Al Franken's show never got above a million and a
half weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience
of the Rush Limbaugh Show. There are lots of theories
(36:53):
about why left wing radio failed. One of them is
that liberals would rather listen to something more thoughtful and
temperate like NPR. But then again, liberals flocked to Comedy Central,
where John Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Rupport were
very much in the mold of Air America. So I
tend to think the was the company. Franken jumped ship
before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven, he
(37:15):
went off the air and announced his run for a
Senate seat from Minnesota. Two thousand and eight was a
wild election year. Barack Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination,
and after he defeated Hillary Clinton, he made his historic
bid for the presidency. Rush Limbaugh turned the fire hose
of his fury from the Clintons to the Obamas. He
(37:38):
played on air a song called Barack the Magic Negro.
Obama decided to let that pass, which is likely why
you've never heard of it. Obama won in something close
to a landslide, and Al Franken became the new Senator
from Minnesota. In office, Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was
mostly known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working.
Speaker 15 (38:03):
In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next
two years, the budget deal on the some of the
extreme across the board cuts of the sequester that will
enable us to make more.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
In twenty fourteen, Franken won reelection to the Senate. He
was sort of a non story. Meanwhile, rush Limbaugh's tirades
grew louder and louder all through Obama's two terms in office.
Limbaugh urged obstructionism, the rejection of all compromise. Thank you.
Speaker 7 (38:40):
Let's say, as conservatives, liberals demand that we be bipartisan
with them in Congress. What they mean is we check
our core principles at the door. Come and let them
run the show, and then agree with them. That's my
partnership to them.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Okay, I've got to stop the tape. I am so
sick of this. Hel Franken, when he was writing that
book about Limbaugh, said it took a real toll on
him to have to listen to this guy all the time.
I feel that it's like reading hate mail. To be honest,
I find listening to Al Franken pretty grading too. But
when you're researching historical development, you don't choose the evidence
(39:17):
you enjoy. Your job is to listen to all of it.
Speaker 7 (39:23):
To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with
us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
And that has to be what you're focused on.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
a new.
Speaker 8 (39:56):
Opponent, politicians are all talk.
Speaker 6 (40:00):
And no action.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
fighting the far right.
Speaker 18 (40:07):
I'm Al frankan Minnesota senator and world renowned expert on
right wing megalomaniacs, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and now Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And that was the right genealogy, Limbaugh made Trump possible.
Trump's whole I alone can fix it. Thing that was
straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that Limbaugh cultivated, those
dittoheads that became trump Ism, those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh.
All this led the political outsider Trump to an unexpected victory.
(40:52):
But long after Trump won, Limbaugh remained fixated on the
outgoing president.
Speaker 11 (40:57):
The first moment that Trump does anything that is the
unraveling of an Obama agenda item.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Obama's going to be on TV. Hey, you know what,
I won't go on TV.
Speaker 11 (41:08):
I'm glad you'd exclue.
Speaker 10 (41:11):
TMP about destroy Obama.
Speaker 14 (41:13):
Ker.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
I find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong
it was, Because, of course, Obama did not go on
television and damn Trump's every move. Instead, Obama kept quiet
for pretty much all four years of Trump's administration. Obama
played by old school rules. The ex president steps out
of politics, the rules that every other American president of
(41:34):
whatever party had played by from the beginning. Limba, though,
seemed no longer able to imagine that anyone still played
by rules. Twenty first century political warfare is a battle
for truth. People like to say, but more and more.
I think it has been a battle about doubt. Believe
(41:56):
only me, doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was
the voice of America. L Franken tried to fact check him.
Then Donald Trump said he was the voice of America,
and then all hell broke loose.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I can do anything whatever you want, grab them by them,
I can do any of them.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
After the Access Hollywood tape came out just before the
twenty sixteen election, Trump said it was just locker room talk.
Speaker 16 (42:27):
I've been in a lot of locker rooms.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
That's Al Franken on Late Night with Seth Myers.
Speaker 16 (42:33):
I you know, I belong with a health club OA
in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
I think you can tell.
Speaker 9 (42:38):
Yeah, we can tell.
Speaker 14 (42:40):
And our locker room banter is stuff like is Trump crazy?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
In the end, though, one politician who would be brought
down for trump sins would be Al Franken. In twenty seventeen,
a conservative talk radio host named Leeann Tweeden went on
the air at KABC in Los Angeles with a bombshell.
Speaker 9 (43:09):
Who is your abuser?
Speaker 19 (43:13):
Senator Al Franken. It was in two thousand and six
we were going on a USO tour. He gave me
the script, and you know, it was full of sexual
innu windows and it was supposed to be funny, you know.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Tweeden told the story of how back in two thousand
and six, she and Franken had been together in Kuwait,
backstage at a USO tour, rehearsing for the show.
Speaker 19 (43:36):
And he mashes his mouth up against mine and he
sticks his tongue in my mouth. And as it happens,
it happens so fast, and he puts his tongue in
my mouth and his mouth is just wet and slimy.
I was violated. I was disgusted. That's not what I
was expecting. All I could think about was that's what
you wrote that in the script for, so you could
do that to me.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Also, there was a cringey photo.
Speaker 14 (43:58):
A photo has surfaced today showing Tweeting asleep on the
flight back home, and it reveals Franken groping her.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but then seven other women
made accusations against him, mostly about unwanted touching. Pressured by
his Democratic Senate colleagues, Franken resigned. His speech on the
Senate floor was.
Speaker 14 (44:21):
Bitter, I of all people am aware that there is
some irony in the fact that I am leaving while
a man who has bragged on tape about his history
of sexual assault sits in the Ovoil office.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
When the New Yorkers Jane Mayer reinvestigated the case, Franken
told her that he regretted resigning. Seven current and former
senators who urged him to resign said they regretted it too.
As Mayor told NPR, there were holes in Tweeden's story.
Speaker 10 (44:54):
She had never been subjected to any fact checking. She
had never produced any corroborators. And I spoke to eight
people on that USO tour who had no political agenda,
and most of them were in the military, and they
were right there and they just didn't she is voice
she saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
As Mayor pointed out, Leanne Tweeden claimed, Franken wrote the
controversial skit in two thousand and six for her, but
in fact, and this is indisputable, he wrote it in
two thousand and three. Other actresses had played that same role,
but something else was lost in the frenzy around Tweeden's allegations.
Her employer, KABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden
(45:36):
is a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh
and KABC did not reach out to get a comment
from al Franken about Tweeden's accusations before airing them because
a right to reply that was a rule that dated
to the forgotten era of the fairness doctrine. I'm not
saying al Franken is the hero of this story. He's not,
(45:56):
but he isn't the villain either. Hyper Polarized politics will
always tend to dualism, good versus evil. The error of
the left is that it keeps joining this game of
mayhem instead of restoring the rules. In February of twenty twenty,
during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
(46:20):
Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom.
Speaker 8 (46:25):
Here tonight is a special man, be loved by millions
of Americans who just received a Stage four advanced cancer diagnosis.
This is not good news. But what is good news
is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that
you will ever meet.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Limbaugh was dying of lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering
in the political wilderness all that year. Trump and Limbaugh
kept saying that Democrats were going to steal the twenty
twenty election. But stealing elections was a go peck golden oldie,
the two nut Gingrich had played back in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
They're going to buy a registration, they're going to buy votes,
they're going to turn out votes, They're going to steal votes.
They're going to do anything they can.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Now you have to understand that, stop the steal, Gingrich
said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty he
was saying it all over again. Two days after the.
Speaker 13 (47:24):
Election, you know, one's to be of any doubt. You
are watching an effort to steal the presidency, and I says.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Joe Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then
two months later, on January sixth, the next episode of
the Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many ruvers
(47:52):
of doubt that dumped us into the sea of political catastrophe,
the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Against the backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
(48:13):
right wing media began to crumble. A corporation that owns
talk radio stations across the country ordered its hosts to
stop saying the election was stolen and told them instead
to induce national calm. Now, Rush Limbaugh, though he was
having none of it.
Speaker 11 (48:32):
There's a lot of people calling for the end of violence.
There's a lot of conservatives social media who say that
any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of
the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual
(48:57):
Tea Party guys the minute Lexington and Conquered didn't feel
that way.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Rush Limbaugh died six weeks after that broadcast. The King
of a m Radio left behind in America more bewildered
and angry than ever, the nation split by a growing
canyon of talk with no bridges of meaning. That canyon
looked like it might just swallow up the oldest democracy
(49:27):
in the world. The Last Archive is written and hosted
by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon
and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton
and our executive producer is Mielbel. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer.
(49:48):
Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi
and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonett. Our research assistants are
Camanie Panthea and Lily Richmond. Our fool proof players Arioshia Mao,
Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bossy, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschelfeld, Becca A. Lewis,
Andrew Perella, Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton Sosia. Thanks to
(50:10):
Brian Rosenwald for his book Talk Radios America. We couldn't
have written this episode without it, and thanks to Simon Leek.
The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At
Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz, Carlin Migliori,
Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rosstak, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kinnig,
(50:31):
and Daniella Lacan. Many of our art effects are from
Harry Jeanett Junior and the Star Jeannette Foundation. If you
like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill
Obour
Pushkin. I promise not to get too technical with you,
but bear with me for a second. I am speaking
to you now through an electro voice ARI twenty microphone.
It's black with a mesh cap at the top, kind
of clunky, very eighties looking. It's pretty weighty. I think
(00:36):
if you clubbed someone with it, you could probably knock
them unconscious. Same deal if you just talk real slow
and boring. Some people, people who spend all their time
thinking about recording equipment, think it sounds honky in the parlance.
I'm not entirely sure what that means. In any way,
I like it. My Ari twenty, however, is not gold plated.
(00:56):
But today on the show, we have the story of
somebody who's was Rush Limbaugh is probably the most famous
conservative talk radio host of the twentieth and twenty first century.
He was a larger than life personnel, and he contributed
a whole lot to the hyper partisan, hyper polarized media
landscape we live in today. Making the story you're about
(01:17):
to hear, we listened to a lot of Rush limbat tape,
and when you listen to enough of it, you begin
to feel his voice like it's hammering into your skull.
Whatever you think of the man's politics. He was an
all time Hall of Fame shock chock. He was very,
very good at his job. When he really wanted to
make a point, he'd lean in really close to the
microphone like this. It's called eating the microphone. Well, the
(01:41):
episode I'm about to play you is about how that
gold plated microphone eight American politics. Since the beginning of radio,
people have worried about its power. On the radio, millions
of people can hear a single voice all at the
same time, with sound effects and on scene reporting, radio
could put images and ideas into the listener's mind, your mind.
(02:04):
People thought it was so powerful it could be a
great tool for democracy, a way to educate everyone in
the country. But if radio was that powerful, couldn't it
be a tool for totalitarianism and groupthink. In nineteen thirty three,
Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Gerbels wrote, the German radio, under
national socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct
(02:25):
instrument for educating and restructuring the German nation end quote.
In the US people were worried about that version of
the radio, so they made laws and rules and norms
to keep it at bay, the fairness doctrine, equal time.
Those were some of them. But surveying the last one
hundred years of media history, you might get the feeling
(02:46):
that fairness and equality haven't really been the trajectory. This
episode looks at what went wrong with the media and
politics and points to the history of the moment we're
in now, where it seems as if every American lives
in his or her own version of reality. From our
second season, recorded back in twenty twenty one, Here's hush Rush.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
There's a place in our world where the known things go.
A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves cluttered with proof. Inside.
I've been cataloging my collection of evidence about propagandists, hypnotists
and conspiracy theorists, labeling reels with masking tape and sharpies,
(03:28):
organizing them by date, reel after reel of tape. It's
like the Nixon Novle Office in here, recordings of the
sorts of people we've been listening to all season, episode
after episode.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Your command of whole life in the months of worldwide lungfuls.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
The man who makes his living by telling the truth, the.
Speaker 5 (03:47):
Man who I got to say.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
I want you to keep on going back and back
and back in your mind, the wall of secrecy, the
news media being silent, and the Patsy's locked up, and
the psychological profile.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Robert Ripley, access Sally, Maury Bernstein, May Brussel, Valentine, Yeah, boys,
Kaya and I I mean, each of them asking you,
the listener, to doubt what you think you know, and
very often that doubt is delivered through the medium of radio.
(04:26):
I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
the rest, all balled up together.
Speaker 6 (04:32):
You are, my.
Speaker 7 (04:32):
Friends, about to be exposed to the kind of bristling,
cogent analysis available nowhere else. Because of this, your initial
reaction may be shock and disbelief.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
That's the voice of mister Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jill Lapour,
host of a show that could hardly be more different
from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Welcome to the Last Archive,
the show about how we know what we know and
why sometimes it seems lately as if we don't know
anything at all. Step over the threshold and along the
passage of time to the year nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Don't fight it, don't even try. Just surrender yourself.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Surrender yourself that's his mantra, it's not mine. My mantra
is never surrender. What's the first thing you do when
you get in the car, Collect the seatbelt, switch on
the ignition, Turn on the radio. Yeah, find the right station.
(05:33):
Here's a little there you want there, jingle one gracious Roman.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Her just say times.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Carry radios first became common in the nineteen thirties. For
decades radio was am radio, local stations, maybe with some
top of the hour news and a lot of sports.
Speaker 8 (06:06):
Baseball.
Speaker 9 (06:07):
You by the first bag of the bank of since
that or your money grows safely and high return certificates
of the body.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Something else that had long been popular on AM radio
gospel shows.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
The voice of the Hour of Decision, Billy Graham, So
for you, for the nation, this is the Hour of Decision.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
By the nineteen seventies, the most popular AM radio shows
were drivetime shows, the ones that aired during your commute.
Rock and Roll hosted by fast talking djsk.
Speaker 10 (06:43):
Nine oh three and fourteen k on the award winning
Ye Rock Game.
Speaker 11 (06:47):
Roll Over the show with Bunny and Product for all
some of you, no doubts, no wondering, one award.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
I have won.
Speaker 7 (06:52):
I'll tell you not out of the Marconia Warren More
Textlent Rock Kennery, that.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Young Boogaroo, that's the young Rush Limbaugh. Jeff Christy, this
is non to radio backs in.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Boy, congratulate our name and acclaiment winners.
Speaker 7 (07:08):
Jeff round With of Eastmont.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
I'll tell you, Jem I will think you twelve six
packs of Carefree sugarlist gun to get to it all day.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Limbaugh was born in Missouri. He went to Southeast Missouri
State University for a year, but dropped out to work
in radio. In nineteen seventy one, he got a job
as a disc jockey at an AM station outside Pittsburgh.
He got fired after a year and a half and
went to a station called.
Speaker 7 (07:30):
Kqv And that one time made the twelve more entries
for you in the Camfree Rock Concert contrast.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
You and Jack Box for Tomorrow is.
Speaker 7 (07:37):
Two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen sent the lot
of guys that you can remember it. Bob deccannell makes
the next.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Call the one.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Limbaugh died in twenty twenty one at the age of seventy.
His obituaries head headlines like We're living in the world.
Rush Limbaugh created and that's true. But even though you
may think you know all the ways we now live
in Rush Limbaugh's world, there's more to understand. It has
to do with what a lot of this season has
(08:03):
been exploring how we hear voices on the radio. There
were lots of testimonials to Limbo after he died, but
one comment really stuck with me. A guy wrote on
YouTube his show was the only one that came in clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
So I listened.
Speaker 7 (08:20):
People are thinking of a Jefferson Startist show.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
Work of way details them.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Limbaugh even when he was Jeff Christi. He was a
big guy, wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality,
a little George Costanza meets Fred Flinstone. In nineteen seventy four,
he lost yet another job. He moved back home with
his parents in Missouri. He was twenty three. It was
a very tough time to try to make a career
in AM radio, mainly because FM radio was on the rise.
Speaker 5 (08:53):
FM radio a fight free static three FM or FM
stereo car radio. Child Survey It's out of silent day.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of Elvis the
Little Richard, people bought FM radios for their houses. But
the FMI I only really exploded in the nineteen seventies, when,
for the first time, you could get FM in your car.
At this point, AM radio was mono, just one track.
FM was stereo. It was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to
(09:25):
switch from plain old mono to stereo. He'd bring your
car into the shop and switch out your AM radio
for an FM radio with stereo speakers. Seem this change
in the sound of radio from AM to FM would
have vast repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very
(09:46):
long reverb, AM radio suffered, listenership plummeted, and then so
did AD revenue. By nineteen eighty seven, the majority of
AM radio stations were no longer making a profit, and
people who worked at AM radio stations in the nineteen
seventies were losing their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh,
(10:07):
who'd been moving from job to job had landed.
Speaker 12 (10:10):
All the DJs got fired.
Speaker 11 (10:12):
I was spared as assistant program director, and you know
what that meant, programming the automation machine.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Limba didn't last long as an assistant program director. He
took a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
AM radio stations were beginning to figure out that if
they could leave music to the FM band and concentrate
on talk shows, they could start making money again. In
mono talk sounds fine, even if you might not agree
with what someone's saying.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
The simple fact matter is that the homeless advocacy in
this country is, I think, based upon fraud.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name, Limbaugh
started a new kind of talk radio show in Sacramento
on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Soon he had a deal for national syndication.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
The opinions expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program did not
necessarily reflect those of WABC Radio or its management, and
now here's Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 7 (11:15):
Either way. That's a Gutlass disclaimer. The view is expressed
by the host of this show ought to become federal
law in the station and sponsors all who heartily endorse them.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
The Rush Limbaugh Show was a one way wall of talk.
Limbaugh was funny, he was angry. His program started with
a news digest, then a series of opinions mixed with
calls from listeners who agreed with those opinions. Year's voice now,
and it sounds so utterly familiar. That's because it's the
voice of the political YouTuber, or of a certain sort
(11:47):
of podcaster, brash, annoying, know it all. But it was
a new voice then, and it spoke to listeners for
three hours a day, five days a week.
Speaker 7 (11:58):
So to give you just a bit of an idea
about the show, there are no guests never. We don't
talk about single issues or themes unless they evolve as
the program goes. It is pretty much an open line
discussion each and every day.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Limba revolutionized radio open line. It was all him, even
some of the ads. At a time when human resources
departments were newly requiring sexual harassment training, Limbaugh spent a
lot of his time on air attacking feminists, especially after
Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
(12:41):
Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
give you two glorious nyems for an Anita Hell.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Trading cards have always been for males only.
Speaker 9 (12:50):
It's just not fair, It's not right. Damn I spilt
ill past my Betty freedan.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Feminazi cards are designed with a woman in mind.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
I'll up front, I remember in those years my dad
listening to Limba, who drove my mother nuts. I bet
a lot of families had an experience like that. Limba.
He'd say it seemed anything, so partly people tuned in
for the thrill of it, to hear what he'd say next.
For the rest of us, though, it was like getting
kicked in the face every day. He went after feminists,
(13:17):
He liked to mock environmentalists, gays and lesbians. He made
a lot of jokes about aides. Despite or really because
of all that, Limbo's audience just grew and grew. Mainly
that audience was men, white men who were angry. As
angry as Rush seemed to be real. Wages for white
men who had gone to college were dropping. They're still dropping.
(13:39):
Some of these guys really did have a lot to
be angry about. Rush told them who to be angry at.
The people who loved Rush. They called themselves dittoheads because
they believed everything he said and would say it back ditto.
Limbo's format, the wall of Talk pushed nearly everything else
off talk radio, all the kooky chit chat and cooking
(14:03):
shows and carpentry shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations,
which for a long time time had been mom and
pop operations, were getting bought out by giant, consolidated, national,
and even global corporations. Here I've got to disclose something
about that consolidation. The Rush Limbaugh Show was eventually syndicated
(14:24):
by an outfit called clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel
rebranded itself as iHeart Media, and an arm of iHeart
now sells ads for Pushkin Industries, which is the production
house that makes the last Archive. So this is like
when the Washington Post reports on Amazon and then has
to mention that the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Okay,
(14:44):
the last Archive is not the Washington Post, and iHeart
doesn't own Pushkin. But still it's important to disclose these things.
Limbaugh liked to present himself as a cowboy, a maverick, bold, reckless,
and unpredictable. In reality, he was more like the Wonderbread
of radio, the factory made whitebread of radio, who was
the same every goddamn day, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
(15:07):
ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
five days a week. But the forces that had to
do with Limbaugh's success had to do with more than
just radio formats. For years, Limbaugh's fortunes rose while other
medias fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
(15:32):
didn't seem to mind.
Speaker 7 (15:35):
If you listened to this show every day, you never
need to read another newspaper again, never read on a magazine.
I do it for you, and you get a bonus.
I tell you what to think about this incredibly complicated
and controversial issue.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I tell you what to think. And he wasn't joking.
Limba presented himself as a prophet liberals and Feminazis, they
were heretics. Limba was talking politics, but his show was
less like a news program than like those old radio
gospel shows. Politics as preaching, listening as worship, conservatism as
a new religion. Scholars call this called sectarianism, and in
(16:11):
this era, sectarianism was headed to Washington.
Speaker 12 (16:15):
At gopack, our mission is to gain control of the
US House of Representatives.
Speaker 13 (16:20):
We're developing a farm team of future congressional candidates.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
That's audio from what's known as a go Pack tape,
one of the thousands of tapes made by a GOP
political action committee that had become the mouthpiece for just
one man.
Speaker 13 (16:34):
This is Congress and Nude Gingrich. As a candidate, you've
probably been listening to tapes from gopack all year, and
you know that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain
basic approaches.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia. Gingrich heard what
Limbaugh was doing on air, and in the late nineteen
eighties started to record his own version of that format
through these go pack cassette tapes. If you were a
Republican running for office or working on a campaign, you'd
probably listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
Speaker 13 (17:04):
In this tape, we have a speech I gave to
the Republicans in California. We decided to share with you
as an example of how you can bring all the
basic values together.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
This is the sound of modern political history, shifting gears
and burning out the clutch. The tapes were mailed to
thousands of people every month. One Republican from Minnesota told
PBS's Frontline how crucial they were when.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
They would come.
Speaker 7 (17:30):
I mean, and you spent some time in a car,
particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
Speaker 9 (17:34):
When they would come in the mail.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
I mean I would open them up right away, and
I would put them in a cassette player within twenty
four hours.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
The purpose of the tapes was to create a single
national message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads.
Speaker 13 (17:52):
There are two movements in America. There's a left wing
radical movement, and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority,
the basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of
how we think you can draw those lines.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Gingrich proposed a set of dualisms for candidates to use
in ads. You might think this kind of hyper polarized
rhetoric is more recent, a product of social media, maybe,
but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 13 (18:18):
We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
allowing honest citizens stone guns. The radical left introduced to
build a legalize sex with animals, but we oppose legal
sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
of sex with animals.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
In the early nineteen nineties, and a memo sent out
with the tapes, go Back supplied candidates with a vocabulary list.
It suggested words to use to help define your campaign change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
hard work, initiative, common sense.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Go Peck also listed words to use to describe your
political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
Lie, shallow, traders, sensationalists, in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
This was political warfare on all fronts. Gingrich trained the officers,
Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingrich's political power grew, and so
did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
In nineteen ninety one, Limba appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
What are you trying to do with this show?
Speaker 7 (20:04):
I'm trying to attract the largest audience I can and
hold it for as long as I can so that
I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertiser rates. This is a business.
Speaker 11 (20:13):
You're in it for the money.
Speaker 7 (20:18):
Sure, of course, I'm doing a lot of this for money.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
That's Limbaugh earning points for being honest. It's also a tactic.
Donald Trump would adopt honesty about loving money. Listeners adored it.
For talk radio, the money came rolling in, and not
just for Limbaugh. Between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety four,
an average of twenty new talk radio stations went into
business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
(20:45):
not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners.
Speaker 14 (20:52):
No sports, no back, no information for mindless shatter your station.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
Kay BBL Talk Radio on Alice Springfield's papered conservative and
author of the well selling book Only Turkeys Have Left Wings,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
Speaker 8 (21:04):
Birch Barlow.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
the Simpsons.
Speaker 7 (21:09):
Good morning, fellow freedomlikers, Birch Barlow, the fourth branch of government,
the fifty first State.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
The more famous Limbaugh got, the more worried observers got,
especially about how he talked about talk, how he talked
about the freedom of speech, how he talked about fairness itself.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
This is also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator.
There is no First Amendment here except for me.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, right, the First Amendment only constrains the government, not
a privately owned radio station. But for most of the
twentieth century there'd been some rules in place, rules that
date to a time when people understood just how dangerous
radio could be if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties,
(21:59):
a guy named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from
President Roosevelt. Derr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best
known to history for something he did much later in
the nineteen fifty when he and his wife bailed Rosa
Parks out of jail. Anyway, in nineteen forty one, FDR
appointed Dr to the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, and
(22:20):
I said, what was that? The FCC is the federal
agency that regulates who can get broadcast licenses to use
the airwaves, which after all, belonged to the public.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
When I went on to the FCAC, I knew absolutely
nothing about it. But at the time, we will monitor
all the access broadcast.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I did an episode earlier this season called The Inner Front.
It talks about how the US government monitored Radio Berlin
and Radio Tokyo. That was part of the FCC's job
during the Second World War, but the content of those
enemy broadcasts really changed how Durer and the FCC thought
about the power of radio.
Speaker 6 (23:00):
My god, this is a terrific medium. The other can
be magnificent. I can completely ruin you if you've got
this thing in the wrong hands. So then Adam again
to take a more place to look at an American broadcast.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
The FCC started enforcing some rules that were on the
books but that have been mostly ignored, and Der's influence
would lead to a new rule that would shape broadcasting
for the next half century. In nineteen forty nine, the
FCC established what became known as the Fairness doctrine.
Speaker 9 (23:34):
Under the American system of broadcasting, the individual licensees of
radio stations have the responsibility for determining the specific program
material to be broadcast over their stations.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
So you could broadcast whatever you wanted.
Speaker 9 (23:47):
Except This choice, however, must be exercised in a manner
consistent with the basic policy of the Congress that radio
be maintained as a medium of free speech for the
general public as a whole, rather than as an outlet
for the purely personal or private interests of the licensee.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
The fairness doctrine is about the public interest. It says
the government has an interest in what radio is dinations broadcast.
It says that on the issues of the day, radio
stations have to broadcast more than one view.
Speaker 9 (24:16):
This requires that licensees devote a reasonable percentage of their
broadcast time to the discussion of public issues of interest
in the community served by their stations, and that such
programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable
opportunity to hear different opposition positions.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
In the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by
way of congressional action, and the Johnson administration added a
guarantee for a right of reply after a criticism during
a broadcast. It wasn't often enforced, but it did happen sometimes,
like when Medgar Evers once got seventeen minutes of airtime
(24:55):
to respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when
conservatives attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test ban treaty, stations were
required to play a pro test ban speech by the
president himself. This was exact bactly the kind of thing
that ticked conservatives off. Rules that required listeners to hear
more from Edgar Evers hear more from President Kennedy.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
All mankind has been struggling to escape from the dockning
prospect of mash destruction on Earth.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
In nineteen sixty nine, the Supreme Court affirmed much of
the Fairness Doctrine, but conservatives are getting more and more
peeved about it, believing that the Fairness Doctrine suppressed conservative views.
By the nineteen eighties, they really wanted to get rid
of it, and it was vulnerable because it was a regulation,
not a law. In nineteen eighty five, a new FCC
head appointed by President Reagan said he would fight to
(25:50):
end the Fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Congress passed a bill that would have established the doctrine
as law, but Reagan vetoed it and Congress didn't have
the votes to override his veto. The doctrine was.
Speaker 9 (26:04):
Dead, and now here's Russe Limbaugh.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Limbaugh could not have operated if the Fairness Doctrine had
still been in place, at least not without worrying that
the FCC might come after him because he used his
airtime to promote partisanship. In fact, he was more than
a partisan. Limbaugh wanted to be a king Maker. In
nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan failed
to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
(26:37):
But when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Limbaugh sounded a
battle cry. He made it his mission to take down
the Clintons, both of them.
Speaker 7 (26:46):
The Clintons are running around on this national tour. Now,
you know, I don't know how else to say this.
I mean, the president gets away when he says something
it isn't true later being told about, Oh yeah, I
was an inadvertent statement. The motto of this administration every
day is what can we do to fool him? Today?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Bill Clinton, for sure did sometimes lie, no question, but
fooling people was not the motto of his administration. Clinton
got exasperated. You can hear him on Saint Louis AM
Radio practically begging for a rite of reply.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh,
I'll have three hours to say whatever he wants, and
I won't have any opportunity to respond. And there's no
truth detector. You won't get on afterwards and say what
was true and what was.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
In nineteen ninety three, Democrats in Congress tried to bring
back the fairness doctrine. Limbaugh like to call their effort
the hush rush Bill, but other people on talk radio
didn't see.
Speaker 5 (27:40):
It that way.
Speaker 12 (27:42):
I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
ninety three.
Speaker 5 (27:49):
I like it.
Speaker 12 (27:50):
I like the fact that we as broadcasters have to
be fair. It is not out to get any broadcast.
I know Rush Limbaugh thinks they're out to get them.
All it means is that a station who has if
you have eight right wing hosts, you better put some
left wing hosts on.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
I don't know what's wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
But the fairness doctrine was not reinstated, and in nineteen
ninety four, in the midterm elections, Republicans flipped the Senate
and the House. It was a wipeout. They took ten governorships,
they won state legislatures if they elected Newt Gingrich Speaker
of the House. The freshman Republicans in the House named
Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class, and he
(28:29):
went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged by reporters
asking him how talk radio had led the Conservatives to victory.
Speaker 7 (28:36):
These reporters who asked me questions about talk radio were
all trying to say, in a roundabout way, that I
took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to
mind numbed robots, and every day would send out code
in my show that would force them to march to
the polls on November the eighth of the poll the
(28:57):
lever I wanted them to poll.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Listening to Limbaugh's speech to the freshman Republican members of
the House, you can hear them giggling as Limbaugh turned
to a new topic, reports of secret meetings that Built
and Hillary Clinton were holding in the White House about me.
Speaker 7 (29:14):
They're trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
They're scouring America looking for some liberal.
Speaker 7 (29:21):
Host who can automatically end up on six hundred and
sixty radio stations.
Speaker 5 (29:25):
They think that they can.
Speaker 7 (29:27):
Just pluck some liberal out of the sky and put
him on the radio and create a bunch of liberal
mind numb robots.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Point taken Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numb robots.
But remember he asked his listeners to surrender to his
point of view, and millions of them did just that
you might not like the fairness doctrine. You might want
some other sort of guidelines or mechanisms in place, you
might want none at all. But whatever your view, you
(29:54):
still got to wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't
really work if people only listen to one kind of
political opinion all day, every day. Limbo was right about
one thing, though, in this era with the fairness doctrine dead,
some people really were looking for a liberal version of him,
not someone who would hush Rush, someone who would crush Rush.
Speaker 15 (30:15):
Hen you welcome me out, Franken, show, I'm out, Franken.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
The left answer to Rush Limba would be for a while,
this guy, Alan Stuart Franken, a comedian best known at
the time for his work on Saturday Night Live. Franken
had written a book called Rush Limbo Is a Big,
Fat Idiot and Other Observations. He came out in nineteen
ninety six. The audiobook version gives you an idea of
(30:40):
Franken's vibe at the time.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
I thought the title, aside from the obvious advantage of
being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books. Let me
explain why it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing
out that he's a big lard butt.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Franken told c SPAN he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite.
Speaker 10 (30:58):
If Rush Limbaugh were to write a book about you,
what would its title be?
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Uh, The guy who got me, the guy who held
me accountable, the guy who my ass.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
Franken owned his comedy style deadpan, a bit obnoxious, part
smart alec, part frat boy. Here he is talking to
an audience of college students.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
What I do is in propaganda.
Speaker 16 (31:25):
What I do is taking what they say and using
it against them.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
What I do is jiu jitsu.
Speaker 16 (31:34):
They say something ridiculous and then I subject them to
scorn and ridicule.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
That's my job.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Franken had a lot in common with Limbaugh. They were
both born in nineteen fifty one. They're both from the
middle of the country. Limba's from Missouri, Franken grew up
in Minnesota. They both love to perform. Then there are
the differences. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken graduated from Harvard.
The same year that Franken published Rush Limbaugh as a
Big fat Idiot, a new cable television network started up,
(32:05):
Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced. This was
the cable TV version of stuff that Limbaugh and Gingrich
had pioneered. Really, you can put everything on early Fox
News into one of two bins that first labeled Limbaugh,
the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limba, the more
(32:29):
professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the same in
the end, lots of opinion monologues getting viewers to distrust
other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile, talk radio
was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limba did a lot
of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC PMSNBC. He called
(32:52):
US News and World Report, US News, Meet the Press,
meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen ninety eight,
when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through the roof,
both for Fox News and for Talk radio.
Speaker 9 (33:07):
Bill Clinton got call Stumpen.
Speaker 11 (33:11):
Legan turn Monica Lewinsky the blue stain dress.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
All this time, and especially after nine to eleven, a
lot of liberals were still wishing there was a liberal Limbaugh,
so they started a new radio network called Air America.
Air America would launch all kinds of careers, including Rachel
Maddows before joining MSNBC. She had her own Air America show. Now,
(33:39):
Franken came to Air America from the USO. He'd been
going on tours entertaining the troops overseas Bob Hopestyle. He
saw that work as a chance to show that right
wingers didn't have a monopoly on patriotism. Franken, like all
of Air America, had the idea that left wing radio
would offer listeners the opposition positions that the fairness doctrine
would have required if it had still been in place,
(34:02):
though he didn't put it in such lofty terms.
Speaker 15 (34:05):
It's about.
Speaker 16 (34:08):
Answering these fuckheads that have been on the air and
lion and delivering this simplistic, black and white babble about
how the world works, as if they know something, and
they have built this infrastructure of feeding people misinformation about
(34:34):
economic justice and about how our society is run. And
it's about time that somebody fought back.
Speaker 17 (34:45):
Talk to me, talk about the right wing.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
Dis honesty.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Franklin launched his own Air America radio show in two
thousand and four. He delivered something surprising, an old fashioned
variety show sort of Marx Brothers but about politics with
lots of skits.
Speaker 17 (35:09):
Show is brought to you by the Union of Jewish Archaeologists.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
We look at fossils of arightly Man and asked, was.
Speaker 8 (35:18):
This a Jew?
Speaker 2 (35:21):
What else Franken was doing was different from anything else
on the air, mostly though it was different from the
Rush Limbaugh Show. Everything about Franken Show was designed in
opposition to Limbaugh's show. Unlike Limbaugh, who only had guests occasionally,
Franken Show featured them, and unlike Limbaugh, Franken invited calls
from people who disagreed with him. When Franken did monologues,
(35:43):
he often got serious.
Speaker 17 (35:45):
In the early sixties, We'd watch TV. We watched the news,
maryor TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
southern sheriff's sicken police dogs on black demonstrators.
Speaker 14 (35:57):
Made that so that no Jew can be for that.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
The most important part of Franken Show came when he
fact checked the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Speaker 17 (36:04):
How many people listened to him Fifteen to twenty million, right, right, Okay,
so those people believe him, right, yeah, Okay, so most
of his listeners believe is seventy five percent people making
minimum wage are teenagers in their first job. I had
our staff look at up sixty one point one percent
of people earning minimum wage are twenty or over. You know,
(36:26):
we got our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
and he got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Frankn put on a good show, but Air America turned
out to be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run,
beset by financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for
Al Franken's show never got above a million and a
half weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience
of the Rush Limbaugh Show. There are lots of theories
(36:53):
about why left wing radio failed. One of them is
that liberals would rather listen to something more thoughtful and
temperate like NPR. But then again, liberals flocked to Comedy Central,
where John Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Rupport were
very much in the mold of Air America. So I
tend to think the was the company. Franken jumped ship
before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven, he
(37:15):
went off the air and announced his run for a
Senate seat from Minnesota. Two thousand and eight was a
wild election year. Barack Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination,
and after he defeated Hillary Clinton, he made his historic
bid for the presidency. Rush Limbaugh turned the fire hose
of his fury from the Clintons to the Obamas. He
(37:38):
played on air a song called Barack the Magic Negro.
Obama decided to let that pass, which is likely why
you've never heard of it. Obama won in something close
to a landslide, and Al Franken became the new Senator
from Minnesota. In office, Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was
mostly known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working.
Speaker 15 (38:03):
In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next
two years, the budget deal on the some of the
extreme across the board cuts of the sequester that will
enable us to make more.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
In twenty fourteen, Franken won reelection to the Senate. He
was sort of a non story. Meanwhile, rush Limbaugh's tirades
grew louder and louder all through Obama's two terms in office.
Limbaugh urged obstructionism, the rejection of all compromise. Thank you.
Speaker 7 (38:40):
Let's say, as conservatives, liberals demand that we be bipartisan
with them in Congress. What they mean is we check
our core principles at the door. Come and let them
run the show, and then agree with them. That's my
partnership to them.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Okay, I've got to stop the tape. I am so
sick of this. Hel Franken, when he was writing that
book about Limbaugh, said it took a real toll on
him to have to listen to this guy all the time.
I feel that it's like reading hate mail. To be honest,
I find listening to Al Franken pretty grading too. But
when you're researching historical development, you don't choose the evidence
(39:17):
you enjoy. Your job is to listen to all of it.
Speaker 7 (39:23):
To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with
us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
And that has to be what you're focused on.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
a new.
Speaker 8 (39:56):
Opponent, politicians are all talk.
Speaker 6 (40:00):
And no action.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
fighting the far right.
Speaker 18 (40:07):
I'm Al frankan Minnesota senator and world renowned expert on
right wing megalomaniacs, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and now Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And that was the right genealogy, Limbaugh made Trump possible.
Trump's whole I alone can fix it. Thing that was
straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that Limbaugh cultivated, those
dittoheads that became trump Ism, those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh.
All this led the political outsider Trump to an unexpected victory.
(40:52):
But long after Trump won, Limbaugh remained fixated on the
outgoing president.
Speaker 11 (40:57):
The first moment that Trump does anything that is the
unraveling of an Obama agenda item.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Obama's going to be on TV. Hey, you know what,
I won't go on TV.
Speaker 11 (41:08):
I'm glad you'd exclue.
Speaker 10 (41:11):
TMP about destroy Obama.
Speaker 14 (41:13):
Ker.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
I find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong
it was, Because, of course, Obama did not go on
television and damn Trump's every move. Instead, Obama kept quiet
for pretty much all four years of Trump's administration. Obama
played by old school rules. The ex president steps out
of politics, the rules that every other American president of
(41:34):
whatever party had played by from the beginning. Limba, though,
seemed no longer able to imagine that anyone still played
by rules. Twenty first century political warfare is a battle
for truth. People like to say, but more and more.
I think it has been a battle about doubt. Believe
(41:56):
only me, doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was
the voice of America. L Franken tried to fact check him.
Then Donald Trump said he was the voice of America,
and then all hell broke loose.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
I can do anything whatever you want, grab them by them,
I can do any of them.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
After the Access Hollywood tape came out just before the
twenty sixteen election, Trump said it was just locker room talk.
Speaker 16 (42:27):
I've been in a lot of locker rooms.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
That's Al Franken on Late Night with Seth Myers.
Speaker 16 (42:33):
I you know, I belong with a health club OA
in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
I think you can tell.
Speaker 9 (42:38):
Yeah, we can tell.
Speaker 14 (42:40):
And our locker room banter is stuff like is Trump crazy?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
In the end, though, one politician who would be brought
down for trump sins would be Al Franken. In twenty seventeen,
a conservative talk radio host named Leeann Tweeden went on
the air at KABC in Los Angeles with a bombshell.
Speaker 9 (43:09):
Who is your abuser?
Speaker 19 (43:13):
Senator Al Franken. It was in two thousand and six
we were going on a USO tour. He gave me
the script, and you know, it was full of sexual
innu windows and it was supposed to be funny, you know.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Tweeden told the story of how back in two thousand
and six, she and Franken had been together in Kuwait,
backstage at a USO tour, rehearsing for the show.
Speaker 19 (43:36):
And he mashes his mouth up against mine and he
sticks his tongue in my mouth. And as it happens,
it happens so fast, and he puts his tongue in
my mouth and his mouth is just wet and slimy.
I was violated. I was disgusted. That's not what I
was expecting. All I could think about was that's what
you wrote that in the script for, so you could
do that to me.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
Also, there was a cringey photo.
Speaker 14 (43:58):
A photo has surfaced today showing Tweeting asleep on the
flight back home, and it reveals Franken groping her.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but then seven other women
made accusations against him, mostly about unwanted touching. Pressured by
his Democratic Senate colleagues, Franken resigned. His speech on the
Senate floor was.
Speaker 14 (44:21):
Bitter, I of all people am aware that there is
some irony in the fact that I am leaving while
a man who has bragged on tape about his history
of sexual assault sits in the Ovoil office.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
When the New Yorkers Jane Mayer reinvestigated the case, Franken
told her that he regretted resigning. Seven current and former
senators who urged him to resign said they regretted it too.
As Mayor told NPR, there were holes in Tweeden's story.
Speaker 10 (44:54):
She had never been subjected to any fact checking. She
had never produced any corroborators. And I spoke to eight
people on that USO tour who had no political agenda,
and most of them were in the military, and they
were right there and they just didn't she is voice
she saw it.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
As Mayor pointed out, Leanne Tweeden claimed, Franken wrote the
controversial skit in two thousand and six for her, but
in fact, and this is indisputable, he wrote it in
two thousand and three. Other actresses had played that same role,
but something else was lost in the frenzy around Tweeden's allegations.
Her employer, KABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden
(45:36):
is a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh
and KABC did not reach out to get a comment
from al Franken about Tweeden's accusations before airing them because
a right to reply that was a rule that dated
to the forgotten era of the fairness doctrine. I'm not
saying al Franken is the hero of this story. He's not,
(45:56):
but he isn't the villain either. Hyper Polarized politics will
always tend to dualism, good versus evil. The error of
the left is that it keeps joining this game of
mayhem instead of restoring the rules. In February of twenty twenty,
during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
(46:20):
Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom.
Speaker 8 (46:25):
Here tonight is a special man, be loved by millions
of Americans who just received a Stage four advanced cancer diagnosis.
This is not good news. But what is good news
is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that
you will ever meet.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Limbaugh was dying of lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering
in the political wilderness all that year. Trump and Limbaugh
kept saying that Democrats were going to steal the twenty
twenty election. But stealing elections was a go peck golden oldie,
the two nut Gingrich had played back in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
They're going to buy a registration, they're going to buy votes,
they're going to turn out votes, They're going to steal votes.
They're going to do anything they can.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Now you have to understand that, stop the steal, Gingrich
said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty he
was saying it all over again. Two days after the.
Speaker 13 (47:24):
Election, you know, one's to be of any doubt. You
are watching an effort to steal the presidency, and I says.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Joe Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then
two months later, on January sixth, the next episode of
the Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many ruvers
(47:52):
of doubt that dumped us into the sea of political catastrophe,
the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Against the backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
(48:13):
right wing media began to crumble. A corporation that owns
talk radio stations across the country ordered its hosts to
stop saying the election was stolen and told them instead
to induce national calm. Now, Rush Limbaugh, though he was
having none of it.
Speaker 11 (48:32):
There's a lot of people calling for the end of violence.
There's a lot of conservatives social media who say that
any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of
the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual
(48:57):
Tea Party guys the minute Lexington and Conquered didn't feel
that way.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Rush Limbaugh died six weeks after that broadcast. The King
of a m Radio left behind in America more bewildered
and angry than ever, the nation split by a growing
canyon of talk with no bridges of meaning. That canyon
looked like it might just swallow up the oldest democracy
(49:27):
in the world. The Last Archive is written and hosted
by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon
and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton
and our executive producer is Mielbel. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer.
(49:48):
Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi
and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonett. Our research assistants are
Camanie Panthea and Lily Richmond. Our fool proof players Arioshia Mao,
Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bossy, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschelfeld, Becca A. Lewis,
Andrew Perella, Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton Sosia. Thanks to
(50:10):
Brian Rosenwald for his book Talk Radios America. We couldn't
have written this episode without it, and thanks to Simon Leek.
The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At
Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz, Carlin Migliori,
Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rosstak, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kinnig,
(50:31):
and Daniella Lacan. Many of our art effects are from
Harry Jeanett Junior and the Star Jeannette Foundation. If you
like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill
Obour
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