June 17, 2021 • 48 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. 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
(00:40):
masking tape and sharpies, organizing them by date, reel after
reel of tape. It's like the Nixon Oval Office in here,
recordings of the sorts of people we've been listening to
all season, episode after episode, the whole light among the world,
line on a man who makes his living by telling
(01:00):
the truth. I want you to keep on going back,
back and back, and your mindful of them wall of secrecy,
the news media being silent, and the pants he's locked up,
and the psychological profile Robert Ripley, actss Sally Maury Bernstein,
(01:22):
May Brussel Valentin zor yeah, okay, 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.
I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
(01:42):
the rest, all balled up together. You are, my 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. That's the voice of mister
Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jillipoor, host of a show that
could hardly be more different from the Rush Limbaugh Show.
(02:04):
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. Don't fight it, don't even try. Just
surrender yourself. Surrender yourself. That's his mantra, It's not mine.
(02:29):
My mantra is never surrender. What's the first thing you
do when you get in the car, Click the seatbelt,
switch on the ignition, turn on the radio. Yeah, find
the right station here a little there, you want their
(02:52):
dingle one Grace is Roman her car. Radios first became
comment in the nineteen thirties. For decades, radio was AM radio,
(03:13):
local stations, maybe with some top of the hour news
in a lot of sports, red baseball is love. Do
you buy the first bank of the Bank of Sintobaty
or your money grows deeply in high return certificates of
the populo. Something else that had long been popular on
AM radio gospel shows, the voice of the Hour of Decision,
(03:34):
Billy Graham, So for you, for the nation, this is
the Hour of Decision. 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
(03:54):
talking DJs nine O three and fourteen k on the
award winning a ridy rocky roll radio show with funny
and probic for all some of you. No doubt you're
wondering one award I am one. I'll tell you not
other than the mark warning that young buckaroo, that's the
young Rush Limbaugh Jeff Christie was a named radio back
(04:19):
then boy could graduate our name and claim a winner.
Jeff royan with a East bad and also Jeff almost
think he's two six packs of carefree sugar list gun
against it all day. 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
(04:42):
and a half and went to a station called KQUV
and Elmin made the twelve more empreys for you in
the Camprey Rock Conser contest. Even jack Box for tomorrow
is two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen. Then he
got the guys that you can remember it. Bob the
Carnal makes the next call to one. 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.
(05:05):
And that's true. But even though you may think you
know all ways, we now live in Rush Limbaugh's world.
There's more to understand, and has to do with what
a lot of this season has been exploring how we
hear voices on the radio. There were lots of testimonials
to Limbo after he died, but one comment really stuck
(05:26):
with me. A guy wrote on YouTube his show was
the only one that came in clearly, so I listened.
People are slinkingly started sportive way to fail the Limbaugh
Even when he was Jeff Christie, he was a big guy,
wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality, a
(05:49):
little George Costanza meets Fred Flintstone. 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,
a faith free start, a threem or FM stereo car
(06:11):
radio sounds starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of
Elvis Little Richard. People bought FM radios for their houses,
but the FM dial 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.
(06:34):
FM was stereo was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to switch
from plain old mono to stereo. You'd bring your car
into the shop and switch out your AM radio for
an FM radio with stereo speakers. This change in the
sound of radio from AM to FM would have vast
(06:57):
repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very 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
(07:17):
their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh, who'd been
moving from job to job, had landed. All the DJs
got fired. I was spared as assistant program director, and
you know what that meant, programming the automation machine. Limbo
didn't last long as an assistant program director. He took
a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
(07:41):
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. The simple fact matter is that
the homeless advocacy in this country is, I think, based
upon fraud. In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name,
(08:05):
Limbaugh started a new kind of talk radio show, Incremento
on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Soon he had a deal for national syndication. The opinions
expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program do not necessarily reflect
those of WABC Radio or its management, and now here's
(08:26):
a Rush Limbaugh. By the 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 endorsed them. 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
(08:47):
a series of opinions, mixed with calls from listeners who
agreed with those opinions. Here'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 of podcaster. Brash, annoying,
no at all. But it was a new voice then,
and it spoke to listeners for three hours a day,
(09:10):
five days a week. 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 ever,
unless they evolve as the program goes. It is pretty
much an open line discussion each end, every day. Limba
(09:34):
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.
(09:55):
Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
give you two glorious items, mon Anita. Trading cards have
always been for males only. It's just not fair, It's
not right, ya. I still nail post. I'm Betty Freedom.
Feminaz card are design the woman in mind. I remember
in those years my dad listening to Limbaugh. I drove
(10:15):
my mother nuts. I bet a lot of families had
an experience like that Limbaugh. 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. He liked him mock environmentalists, gays
and lesbians. He made a lot of jokes about AIDS.
(10:37):
Despite or really because of all that, Limbaugh's audience just
grew and grew. Mainly that audience was men, white men
who are angry. His angry as rush seemed to be
real wages for white men who had gone to college,
were dropping. They're still dropping. Some of these guys really
did have a lot to be angry about. Rush told
him who to be angry at. The people who loved Rush.
(11:01):
They called themselves ditto heads because they believed everything he
said and would say it back. Ditto Limbo's format, the
wall of talk push nearly everything else off talk radio,
all the kookie chit chat and cooking shows and carpentry
shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations, which for
(11:23):
a long 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 Limbough Show was eventually syndicated by an outfit called
clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel rebranded itself as iHeartMedia,
(11:44):
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, the Last Archive is not
the Washington Post, and iHeart doesn't own Pushkin. But still
it's important to disclose these things. Limbough liked to present
(12:07):
himself as a cowboy, a rick, bold, reckless, and unpredictable.
In reality, he was more like the wonder bread of radio,
the factory made white bread of radio. He was the
same every goddamn day, rant, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
(12:30):
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
media's fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
didn't seem to mind. If you listen to this show
(12:50):
every day, you never need to read another newspaper again,
never read another magazine. I do it for you. When
you get a bonus, I tell you what to think
about this incredibly complicated and controversial issue. I tell you
what to think. And he wasn't joking. Limba presented himself
as a prophet liberals and feminine sees. They were heretics.
(13:10):
Limbaugh 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 political sectarianism, and in this era, sectarianism
was headed to Washington at GOPACK. Our mission is to
(13:31):
gain control of the US House of Representatives. We're developing
a farm team of future congressional candidates. That's audio from
what's known as a GOPACK tape, one of the thousands
of tapes made by a GOP political action committee that
had become the mouthpiece for just one man. This is
congress In nud Gingrich. As a candidate. You've probably been
(13:52):
listening to tapes from GOPAC all year, and you know
that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain basic approaches.
Newt Gingrich, then a Congressman from Georgia. Gingridge, heard what
Limbaugh was doing on air and in the late nineteen
eighties started to record his own version of that format
through these GOP cassette tapes. If you were a Republican
running for office or working on a campaign, he'd probably
(14:15):
listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
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. This is the sound of modern political history,
shifting gears and burning out the clutch. The tapes were
(14:35):
mailed to thousands of people every month. One Republican from
Minnesota told PBS's Frontline how crucial they were. When they
would come. I mean, and you spend some time in
a car, particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
When they would come in the mail, I mean, I
would open them up right away, and I would put
them in a cassette player within twenty four hours. The
(14:56):
purpose of the tapes was to create a single national
message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads. There
are two movements in America. There's a La Twing radical movement,
and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority, the
basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of how
(15:17):
we think you can draw those lines. Kingridge proposed a
set of dualisms for candidates to use in ads. You
might think this kind of hyperpolarized rhetoric is more recent,
a product of social media maybe, but you'd be wrong.
We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
allowing honest citizen stone guns. The radical left introduced to
(15:39):
build a legalized sex with animals, but we oppose legal
sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
of sex with animals. 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 to find your campaign change opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage,
(16:06):
who form, prosperity, cruci, aid, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
hard work, initiative, common sense. Gopeck also listed words to
(16:28):
use to describe your political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal, lie, shallow, traitors, sensationalists,
in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
(16:49):
self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete. This
was political warfare on all fronts. Gingridge trained the officers,
Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingridge's political power grew, and so
did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
(17:11):
In nineteen ninety one, Limbaugh appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
What are you trying to do with this show? 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.
You're in it for the money. Sure, of course, I'm
(17:33):
doing a lot of this for money. 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
(17:53):
business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners. No spots,
no back, no information sat Kay BBL Talk Radio, and
Al Springfield's favorite conservative and author of the well selling
(18:15):
book Only Turkeys, Half Left Wings, Ladies and Gentlemen, Burch Barlow.
You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
the Simpsons Good Morning, fellow freedomlikers, Burch Barlow, the fourth
branch of government, the fifty first State. 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. This is
(18:39):
also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator. There is
no First Amendment here except for me. 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 the date to a
time when people understood just how dangerous radio could be
(18:59):
if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties, a guy
named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from President Roosevelt.
Dirr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best known to
(19:20):
history for something he did much later in the nineteen fifties,
when he and his wife bailed Rosa Parks out of jail. Anyway,
in nineteen forty one, Fdr appointed dir to the Federal
Communications Commission the FCC. Point in the head of is
that the FCC is the federal agency that regulates who
can get broadcast licenses to use the airwaves, which after
(19:42):
all belonged to the public. I want the FCC onknew
absolutely nothing about it, but at the time we will
mother fret all the actress broadcasts. 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
(20:04):
World War, but the content of those enemy broadcasts really
changed how dr and the FCC thought about the power
of radio. Oh my god, this is a terrific medium.
The other can be magnificent or it can completely ruin
you if you get this thing in their long hands.
(20:25):
So then add again to take a more closer look
at an American broadcast. The FCC started enforcing some rules
that were on the books but that have been mostly ignored,
and Dur's influence would lead to a new rule to
would shape broadcasting for the next half century. In nineteen
forty nine, the FCC established what became known as the
(20:46):
Fairness Doctrine. 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, so
you could broadcast whatever you wanted. Except This choice, however,
must be exercised in a manner consistent with the basic
(21:06):
policy of the Congress that radio being 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. The fairness doctrine is about
the public interest. It says the government has an interest
in what radio stations broadcast. It says that on the
issues of the day, radio stations have to broadcast more
(21:29):
than one view. This requires that licensees to vote 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. In
the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by way
(21:51):
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 to
respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when conservatives
(22:14):
attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test band treaty, stations were required
to play a protest band speech by the President himself.
This was exactly the kind of thing that ticked conservatives off.
Rules that required listeners to hear more from Edgar Evers
hear more from President Kennedy. All mankind has been struggling
to escape from the dokening prospect of mass destruction on Earth.
(22:41):
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
(23:04):
end the fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Congress 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 dead, and now
here's Rice Limbaugh. Limbaugh could not have operated if the
(23:29):
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 kingmaker.
In nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan
failed to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
(23:50):
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. 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
(24:12):
motto of this administration every day is what can we
do to fool them today? 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
right of reply after I get off the radio today
with you, Russ Lamball have three hours to say whatever
(24:34):
he wants, and I won't have any opportunity to respond.
And there's no truth detector. You won't get on afterward
and say what was true and what was 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
it that way. I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
(24:58):
That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
ninety three. I like it. 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. I don't
(25:20):
know what's wrong with that, 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. They elected
Newt Kingbridge Speaker of the House. The Freshman Republicans in
the House named Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class,
(25:43):
and he went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged
by reporters asking him how talk radio had led the
Conservatives to victory. 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
(26:04):
out code in my show that would force them to
march to the polls on November the eighth of the
poll the lever I wanted them to pull. 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 Bill and Hillary
Clinton were holding in the White House about me. They're
(26:28):
trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
They're scouring America looking for some liberal host who can
automatically end up on six hundred and sixty radio stations.
They think that they can just pluck some liberal out
of the sky and put him on the radio and
create a bunch of liberal mind numb robots. Point taken
(26:48):
Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numbed 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've still got to
wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't really work if
(27:11):
people only listened 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 any
welcome the Al Franken Show. I'm Al Franken. The left
(27:33):
answer to Rush Limbo 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 Franken's vibe
(27:55):
at the time. 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. Franken
told he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite. If Rush Limbaugh
were to write a book about you, or would its
title be The Guy who got me, the guy who
(28:20):
held me accountable, the guy who nailed my ass. 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. What I do is in propaganda. What
I do is taking what they say and using it
(28:42):
against them. What I do is jiu jitsu. They say
something ridiculous, and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule.
That's my job. 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. Limbo's from Missouri, Franken
(29:04):
grew up in Minnesota. They both loved to perform. Then
there are the difference. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken
graduated from Harvard. The same year that Franken published Rushed
Limbaugh as a big fat Idiot, a new cable television
network started up, Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced.
(29:28):
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. The first
labeled Limbaugh, the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limbaugh,
the more professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the
same in the end, lots of opinion monologus getting viewers
(29:50):
to distrust other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile,
talk radio was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limbaugh did
a lot of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC p MSNBC.
He called US News and World Report, US snooze, Meet
the press, meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen
(30:14):
ninety eight, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through
the roof, both for Fox News and for talk radio.
Bill Clinton got caught jump legant turn Monica Lewinsky the
blue stand dress. All this time, and especially after nine
(30:35):
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. Al Franken came to Air
America from the USO. He'd been going on tours entertaining
(30:58):
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 radio would offer listeners the opposition
positions that the fairness doctrine would have required if it
had still been in place, so he didn't put it
in such lofty terms. It's about answering these fuckheads that
(31:24):
have been on the air and lyon 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 about economic justice and about
(31:50):
how our society is run. And it's about time that
somebody fought back to talk about the ride wings dishonesty.
(32:10):
Franken 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. Shall brought to you by the Union
of Jewish Archaeologists. We look at fossils of early man
and asked was this a jill? What Al Franken was
(32:36):
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 an 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, he often got serious.
(32:58):
In the early sixties, we'd watch TV. We watched news,
rare TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
Southern sheriff's sicking police dogs on black demonstrators. My dad
so that no Jew can be for that. The most
important part of franken show came when he fact checked
the Rush Limbaugh Show. How many people listen to him?
(33:20):
Fifteen twenty million, right, 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, we got
(33:40):
our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he
got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt. Franken put
on a good show, but Air America turned out to
be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run, beset
five financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for Al
Franken's show never got above a million and a half
(34:01):
weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience of
the Rush Limbo Show. There are lots of theories 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 Stuart's Daily Show and The Colbert Report were
very much in the mold of Air America, so I
(34:22):
tend to think the problem was the company. Franken jumped
ship before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven,
he 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
(34:44):
bid for the presidency. Rush Limbah turned the fire hose
of his fury from the Clintons to the Obama's. He
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
(35:07):
from Minnesota. In Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was mostly
known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working. In
addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next two years,
the budget deal undoes some of the extreme across the
board cuts of the sequester that will enable us to
(35:30):
make more 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.
(35:54):
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
part ship to them. Okay, I've got to stop the tape.
I am so sick of this. Al Franken, when he
(36:14):
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. Two. But when you're researching a historical development,
you don't choose the evidence. You enjoy. Your job is
to listen to all of it. To us, by partisanship
(36:39):
is them being forced to agree with us after we
have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that
has to be what you're fuck is wrong. In two,
(37:05):
thou and sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
a new opponent. Politicians are all talk and no action.
That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
fighting the far right. I'm Al Franken, Minnesota Senator and
(37:29):
world renowned expert on right wing megalomaniacs, Roch Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly,
and now Donald Trump. And that was the right genealogy
Limbaugh made Trump possible. Trump's whole alone can fix it.
(37:50):
Thing that was straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that
Limbaugh cultivated, those ditto heads that became Trump is um,
those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh. All this led the political
outsider Trump to an unexpected victory. But long after Trump won,
Limbaugh remained fixed. Stated on the outgoing president, the first
(38:12):
moment that Trump does anything that he is the unraveling
of an Obama agenda item. Obama is going to be
on TV. Hey you I won't go on TV. I'll
glad you're exclusive Trump. Trump's about to destroy Obama. I
find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong it was, Because,
(38:32):
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 whatever party had
played by from the beginning. Limbaugh, though, seemed no longer
(38:54):
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. Well, leave only me
doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was the voice
(39:15):
of America. Al Franken tried to fact check him. Then
Donald Trump said he was the voice of America, and
then all hell broke loose. You can do anything whatever
you want. I could do anything. After the Access Hollywood
tape came out just before the twenty sixteen election, Trump
(39:38):
said it was just locker room talk. I've been in
a lot of locker rooms. That's Al Franken on Late
Night with Seth Myers. I you know, I belong to
a health club in Minneapolis. I think you can tell. Yeah,
we can tell. And our locker room banter is stuff
(40:00):
like is Trump crazy? 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 Leanne Tweeden went on the air at KBC in
(40:21):
Los Angeles with a bomb show, who is your abuser,
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 innuendos,
and it was supposed to be funny, you know. Tweeden
(40:41):
told the story of how back in two thousand and six,
she and Franken had been together in Kuwait backstage had
a USO tour, rehearsing for the show, and he matches
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
(41:01):
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. Also,
there was a cringey photo. A photo has surfaced today
showing Tweeden asleep on the flight back home and it
reveals Franken groping her. Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but
(41:23):
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 bitter. I have
all people am aware that there is some irony in
the fact that I am leaving while a man who
(41:46):
is bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault
sits in the Oval office. When the New Yorkers Jane
Mayre 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. His mayor told NPR there
(42:06):
were holes in Tweeden's story. She had ever 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 ACHENDA. Most of them were in
the military, and they were right there and they just
didn't say a woy she saw it. As mayor pointed out,
(42:27):
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,
k ABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden is
(42:50):
a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh, and
k ABC 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 the story. He's not,
(43:10):
but he isn't the villain either. Hyperpolarized 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,
(43:30):
during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. Here tonight is a special man beloved by
millions of Americans, who just received a Stage four advanced
cancer diagnosis. This is not good news. But what is
(43:54):
good news is that he is the greatest fighter and
winner that you will ever meet. Limbaugh was dying of
lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering in the political wilderness.
All that year, Trump and Limb kept saying that Democrats
were going to steal the twenty twenty election, but stealing
elections was a go pack golden oldie, a two knute
(44:17):
Gingridge had played back in nineteen eighty eight. They're gonna
buy a registration, They're gonna buy votes, They're gonna turn
out votes, They're gonna steal votes. They're gonna do anything
they can. Now you have to understand that, stop the steal,
Gingridge said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty
he was saying it all over again. Two days after
(44:38):
the election, no one should be of any doubt. You
are watching an effort to steal the presidency. Ansis Joe
Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then two
months later, on January sixth, the next episode of The
(45:03):
Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many rovers of
doubt that dumped us into this sea of political gadab astrophe,
the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Against this backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
(45:27):
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 Limbo, though he was
having none of it. There's a lot of people calling
(45:47):
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,
(46:08):
Thomas Payne, the actual Tea Party guys the minute Lexington
and Conquered didn't feel that way. Rush Limbaugh died six
weeks after that broadcast. The King of AM Radio left
behind in America more bewildered and angry than ever, the
(46:30):
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 in the world. The Last
Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
(46:52):
produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey.
Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is
Mia Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by
Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
of Stellwagen Sympinet. Our research assistants are Kamani Panthier and
Lillie Richmond. Our full proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne,
(47:16):
Matthias boss Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Perella,
Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton. Special thanks to Brian Rosenwald
for his book Talk Radio's 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
(47:37):
thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz, Carly mcgliori,
Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig
and Daniella Lacan. Many of us out effects are from
Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation. If you
like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio app,
(47:58):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jillapoor.
Pushkin. 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
(00:40):
masking tape and sharpies, organizing them by date, reel after
reel of tape. It's like the Nixon Oval Office in here,
recordings of the sorts of people we've been listening to
all season, episode after episode, the whole light among the world,
line on a man who makes his living by telling
(01:00):
the truth. I want you to keep on going back,
back and back, and your mindful of them wall of secrecy,
the news media being silent, and the pants he's locked up,
and the psychological profile Robert Ripley, actss Sally Maury Bernstein,
(01:22):
May Brussel Valentin zor yeah, okay, 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.
I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
(01:42):
the rest, all balled up together. You are, my 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. That's the voice of mister
Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jillipoor, host of a show that
could hardly be more different from the Rush Limbaugh Show.
(02:04):
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. Don't fight it, don't even try. Just
surrender yourself. Surrender yourself. That's his mantra, It's not mine.
(02:29):
My mantra is never surrender. What's the first thing you
do when you get in the car, Click the seatbelt,
switch on the ignition, turn on the radio. Yeah, find
the right station here a little there, you want their
(02:52):
dingle one Grace is Roman her car. Radios first became
comment in the nineteen thirties. For decades, radio was AM radio,
(03:13):
local stations, maybe with some top of the hour news
in a lot of sports, red baseball is love. Do
you buy the first bank of the Bank of Sintobaty
or your money grows deeply in high return certificates of
the populo. Something else that had long been popular on
AM radio gospel shows, the voice of the Hour of Decision,
(03:34):
Billy Graham, So for you, for the nation, this is
the Hour of Decision. 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
(03:54):
talking DJs nine O three and fourteen k on the
award winning a ridy rocky roll radio show with funny
and probic for all some of you. No doubt you're
wondering one award I am one. I'll tell you not
other than the mark warning that young buckaroo, that's the
young Rush Limbaugh Jeff Christie was a named radio back
(04:19):
then boy could graduate our name and claim a winner.
Jeff royan with a East bad and also Jeff almost
think he's two six packs of carefree sugar list gun
against it all day. 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
(04:42):
and a half and went to a station called KQUV
and Elmin made the twelve more empreys for you in
the Camprey Rock Conser contest. Even jack Box for tomorrow
is two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen. Then he
got the guys that you can remember it. Bob the
Carnal makes the next call to one. 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.
(05:05):
And that's true. But even though you may think you
know all ways, we now live in Rush Limbaugh's world.
There's more to understand, and has to do with what
a lot of this season has been exploring how we
hear voices on the radio. There were lots of testimonials
to Limbo after he died, but one comment really stuck
(05:26):
with me. A guy wrote on YouTube his show was
the only one that came in clearly, so I listened.
People are slinkingly started sportive way to fail the Limbaugh
Even when he was Jeff Christie, he was a big guy,
wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality, a
(05:49):
little George Costanza meets Fred Flintstone. 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,
a faith free start, a threem or FM stereo car
(06:11):
radio sounds starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of
Elvis Little Richard. People bought FM radios for their houses,
but the FM dial 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.
(06:34):
FM was stereo was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to switch
from plain old mono to stereo. You'd bring your car
into the shop and switch out your AM radio for
an FM radio with stereo speakers. This change in the
sound of radio from AM to FM would have vast
(06:57):
repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very 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
(07:17):
their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh, who'd been
moving from job to job, had landed. All the DJs
got fired. I was spared as assistant program director, and
you know what that meant, programming the automation machine. Limbo
didn't last long as an assistant program director. He took
a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
(07:41):
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. The simple fact matter is that
the homeless advocacy in this country is, I think, based
upon fraud. In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name,
(08:05):
Limbaugh started a new kind of talk radio show, Incremento
on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Soon he had a deal for national syndication. The opinions
expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program do not necessarily reflect
those of WABC Radio or its management, and now here's
(08:26):
a Rush Limbaugh. By the 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 endorsed them. 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
(08:47):
a series of opinions, mixed with calls from listeners who
agreed with those opinions. Here'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 of podcaster. Brash, annoying,
no at all. But it was a new voice then,
and it spoke to listeners for three hours a day,
(09:10):
five days a week. 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 ever,
unless they evolve as the program goes. It is pretty
much an open line discussion each end, every day. Limba
(09:34):
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.
(09:55):
Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
give you two glorious items, mon Anita. Trading cards have
always been for males only. It's just not fair, It's
not right, ya. I still nail post. I'm Betty Freedom.
Feminaz card are design the woman in mind. I remember
in those years my dad listening to Limbaugh. I drove
(10:15):
my mother nuts. I bet a lot of families had
an experience like that Limbaugh. 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. He liked him mock environmentalists, gays
and lesbians. He made a lot of jokes about AIDS.
(10:37):
Despite or really because of all that, Limbaugh's audience just
grew and grew. Mainly that audience was men, white men
who are angry. His angry as rush seemed to be
real wages for white men who had gone to college,
were dropping. They're still dropping. Some of these guys really
did have a lot to be angry about. Rush told
him who to be angry at. The people who loved Rush.
(11:01):
They called themselves ditto heads because they believed everything he
said and would say it back. Ditto Limbo's format, the
wall of talk push nearly everything else off talk radio,
all the kookie chit chat and cooking shows and carpentry
shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations, which for
(11:23):
a long 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 Limbough Show was eventually syndicated by an outfit called
clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel rebranded itself as iHeartMedia,
(11:44):
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, the Last Archive is not
the Washington Post, and iHeart doesn't own Pushkin. But still
it's important to disclose these things. Limbough liked to present
(12:07):
himself as a cowboy, a rick, bold, reckless, and unpredictable.
In reality, he was more like the wonder bread of radio,
the factory made white bread of radio. He was the
same every goddamn day, rant, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
(12:30):
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
media's fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
didn't seem to mind. If you listen to this show
(12:50):
every day, you never need to read another newspaper again,
never read another magazine. I do it for you. When
you get a bonus, I tell you what to think
about this incredibly complicated and controversial issue. I tell you
what to think. And he wasn't joking. Limba presented himself
as a prophet liberals and feminine sees. They were heretics.
(13:10):
Limbaugh 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 political sectarianism, and in this era, sectarianism
was headed to Washington at GOPACK. Our mission is to
(13:31):
gain control of the US House of Representatives. We're developing
a farm team of future congressional candidates. That's audio from
what's known as a GOPACK tape, one of the thousands
of tapes made by a GOP political action committee that
had become the mouthpiece for just one man. This is
congress In nud Gingrich. As a candidate. You've probably been
(13:52):
listening to tapes from GOPAC all year, and you know
that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain basic approaches.
Newt Gingrich, then a Congressman from Georgia. Gingridge, heard what
Limbaugh was doing on air and in the late nineteen
eighties started to record his own version of that format
through these GOP cassette tapes. If you were a Republican
running for office or working on a campaign, he'd probably
(14:15):
listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
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. This is the sound of modern political history,
shifting gears and burning out the clutch. The tapes were
(14:35):
mailed to thousands of people every month. One Republican from
Minnesota told PBS's Frontline how crucial they were. When they
would come. I mean, and you spend some time in
a car, particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
When they would come in the mail, I mean, I
would open them up right away, and I would put
them in a cassette player within twenty four hours. The
(14:56):
purpose of the tapes was to create a single national
message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads. There
are two movements in America. There's a La Twing radical movement,
and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority, the
basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of how
(15:17):
we think you can draw those lines. Kingridge proposed a
set of dualisms for candidates to use in ads. You
might think this kind of hyperpolarized rhetoric is more recent,
a product of social media maybe, but you'd be wrong.
We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
allowing honest citizen stone guns. The radical left introduced to
(15:39):
build a legalized sex with animals, but we oppose legal
sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
of sex with animals. 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 to find your campaign change opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage,
(16:06):
who form, prosperity, cruci, aid, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
hard work, initiative, common sense. Gopeck also listed words to
(16:28):
use to describe your political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal, lie, shallow, traitors, sensationalists,
in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
(16:49):
self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete. This
was political warfare on all fronts. Gingridge trained the officers,
Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingridge's political power grew, and so
did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
(17:11):
In nineteen ninety one, Limbaugh appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
What are you trying to do with this show? 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.
You're in it for the money. Sure, of course, I'm
(17:33):
doing a lot of this for money. 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
(17:53):
business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners. No spots,
no back, no information sat Kay BBL Talk Radio, and
Al Springfield's favorite conservative and author of the well selling
(18:15):
book Only Turkeys, Half Left Wings, Ladies and Gentlemen, Burch Barlow.
You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
the Simpsons Good Morning, fellow freedomlikers, Burch Barlow, the fourth
branch of government, the fifty first State. 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. This is
(18:39):
also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator. There is
no First Amendment here except for me. 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 the date to a
time when people understood just how dangerous radio could be
(18:59):
if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties, a guy
named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from President Roosevelt.
Dirr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best known to
(19:20):
history for something he did much later in the nineteen fifties,
when he and his wife bailed Rosa Parks out of jail. Anyway,
in nineteen forty one, Fdr appointed dir to the Federal
Communications Commission the FCC. Point in the head of is
that the FCC is the federal agency that regulates who
can get broadcast licenses to use the airwaves, which after
(19:42):
all belonged to the public. I want the FCC onknew
absolutely nothing about it, but at the time we will
mother fret all the actress broadcasts. 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
(20:04):
World War, but the content of those enemy broadcasts really
changed how dr and the FCC thought about the power
of radio. Oh my god, this is a terrific medium.
The other can be magnificent or it can completely ruin
you if you get this thing in their long hands.
(20:25):
So then add again to take a more closer look
at an American broadcast. The FCC started enforcing some rules
that were on the books but that have been mostly ignored,
and Dur's influence would lead to a new rule to
would shape broadcasting for the next half century. In nineteen
forty nine, the FCC established what became known as the
(20:46):
Fairness Doctrine. 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, so
you could broadcast whatever you wanted. Except This choice, however,
must be exercised in a manner consistent with the basic
(21:06):
policy of the Congress that radio being 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. The fairness doctrine is about
the public interest. It says the government has an interest
in what radio stations broadcast. It says that on the
issues of the day, radio stations have to broadcast more
(21:29):
than one view. This requires that licensees to vote 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. In
the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by way
(21:51):
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 to
respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when conservatives
(22:14):
attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test band treaty, stations were required
to play a protest band speech by the President himself.
This was exactly the kind of thing that ticked conservatives off.
Rules that required listeners to hear more from Edgar Evers
hear more from President Kennedy. All mankind has been struggling
to escape from the dokening prospect of mass destruction on Earth.
(22:41):
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
(23:04):
end the fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Congress 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 dead, and now
here's Rice Limbaugh. Limbaugh could not have operated if the
(23:29):
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 kingmaker.
In nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan
failed to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
(23:50):
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. 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
(24:12):
motto of this administration every day is what can we
do to fool them today? 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
right of reply after I get off the radio today
with you, Russ Lamball have three hours to say whatever
(24:34):
he wants, and I won't have any opportunity to respond.
And there's no truth detector. You won't get on afterward
and say what was true and what was 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
it that way. I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
(24:58):
That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
ninety three. I like it. 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. I don't
(25:20):
know what's wrong with that, 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. They elected
Newt Kingbridge Speaker of the House. The Freshman Republicans in
the House named Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class,
(25:43):
and he went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged
by reporters asking him how talk radio had led the
Conservatives to victory. 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
(26:04):
out code in my show that would force them to
march to the polls on November the eighth of the
poll the lever I wanted them to pull. 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 Bill and Hillary
Clinton were holding in the White House about me. They're
(26:28):
trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
They're scouring America looking for some liberal host who can
automatically end up on six hundred and sixty radio stations.
They think that they can just pluck some liberal out
of the sky and put him on the radio and
create a bunch of liberal mind numb robots. Point taken
(26:48):
Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numbed 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've still got to
wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't really work if
(27:11):
people only listened 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 any
welcome the Al Franken Show. I'm Al Franken. The left
(27:33):
answer to Rush Limbo 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 Franken's vibe
(27:55):
at the time. 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. Franken
told he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite. If Rush Limbaugh
were to write a book about you, or would its
title be The Guy who got me, the guy who
(28:20):
held me accountable, the guy who nailed my ass. 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. What I do is in propaganda. What
I do is taking what they say and using it
(28:42):
against them. What I do is jiu jitsu. They say
something ridiculous, and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule.
That's my job. 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. Limbo's from Missouri, Franken
(29:04):
grew up in Minnesota. They both loved to perform. Then
there are the difference. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken
graduated from Harvard. The same year that Franken published Rushed
Limbaugh as a big fat Idiot, a new cable television
network started up, Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced.
(29:28):
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. The first
labeled Limbaugh, the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limbaugh,
the more professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the
same in the end, lots of opinion monologus getting viewers
(29:50):
to distrust other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile,
talk radio was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limbaugh did
a lot of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC p MSNBC.
He called US News and World Report, US snooze, Meet
the press, meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen
(30:14):
ninety eight, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through
the roof, both for Fox News and for talk radio.
Bill Clinton got caught jump legant turn Monica Lewinsky the
blue stand dress. All this time, and especially after nine
(30:35):
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. Al Franken came to Air
America from the USO. He'd been going on tours entertaining
(30:58):
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 radio would offer listeners the opposition
positions that the fairness doctrine would have required if it
had still been in place, so he didn't put it
in such lofty terms. It's about answering these fuckheads that
(31:24):
have been on the air and lyon 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 about economic justice and about
(31:50):
how our society is run. And it's about time that
somebody fought back to talk about the ride wings dishonesty.
(32:10):
Franken 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. Shall brought to you by the Union
of Jewish Archaeologists. We look at fossils of early man
and asked was this a jill? What Al Franken was
(32:36):
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 an 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, he often got serious.
(32:58):
In the early sixties, we'd watch TV. We watched news,
rare TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
Southern sheriff's sicking police dogs on black demonstrators. My dad
so that no Jew can be for that. The most
important part of franken show came when he fact checked
the Rush Limbaugh Show. How many people listen to him?
(33:20):
Fifteen twenty million, right, 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, we got
(33:40):
our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he
got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt. Franken put
on a good show, but Air America turned out to
be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run, beset
five financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for Al
Franken's show never got above a million and a half
(34:01):
weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience of
the Rush Limbo Show. There are lots of theories 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 Stuart's Daily Show and The Colbert Report were
very much in the mold of Air America, so I
(34:22):
tend to think the problem was the company. Franken jumped
ship before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven,
he 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
(34:44):
bid for the presidency. Rush Limbah turned the fire hose
of his fury from the Clintons to the Obama's. He
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
(35:07):
from Minnesota. In Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was mostly
known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working. In
addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next two years,
the budget deal undoes some of the extreme across the
board cuts of the sequester that will enable us to
(35:30):
make more 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.
(35:54):
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
part ship to them. Okay, I've got to stop the tape.
I am so sick of this. Al Franken, when he
(36:14):
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. Two. But when you're researching a historical development,
you don't choose the evidence. You enjoy. Your job is
to listen to all of it. To us, by partisanship
(36:39):
is them being forced to agree with us after we
have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that
has to be what you're fuck is wrong. In two,
(37:05):
thou and sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
a new opponent. Politicians are all talk and no action.
That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
fighting the far right. I'm Al Franken, Minnesota Senator and
(37:29):
world renowned expert on right wing megalomaniacs, Roch Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly,
and now Donald Trump. And that was the right genealogy
Limbaugh made Trump possible. Trump's whole alone can fix it.
(37:50):
Thing that was straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that
Limbaugh cultivated, those ditto heads that became Trump is um,
those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh. All this led the political
outsider Trump to an unexpected victory. But long after Trump won,
Limbaugh remained fixed. Stated on the outgoing president, the first
(38:12):
moment that Trump does anything that he is the unraveling
of an Obama agenda item. Obama is going to be
on TV. Hey you I won't go on TV. I'll
glad you're exclusive Trump. Trump's about to destroy Obama. I
find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong it was, Because,
(38:32):
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 whatever party had
played by from the beginning. Limbaugh, though, seemed no longer
(38:54):
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. Well, leave only me
doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was the voice
(39:15):
of America. Al Franken tried to fact check him. Then
Donald Trump said he was the voice of America, and
then all hell broke loose. You can do anything whatever
you want. I could do anything. After the Access Hollywood
tape came out just before the twenty sixteen election, Trump
(39:38):
said it was just locker room talk. I've been in
a lot of locker rooms. That's Al Franken on Late
Night with Seth Myers. I you know, I belong to
a health club in Minneapolis. I think you can tell. Yeah,
we can tell. And our locker room banter is stuff
(40:00):
like is Trump crazy? 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 Leanne Tweeden went on the air at KBC in
(40:21):
Los Angeles with a bomb show, who is your abuser,
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 innuendos,
and it was supposed to be funny, you know. Tweeden
(40:41):
told the story of how back in two thousand and six,
she and Franken had been together in Kuwait backstage had
a USO tour, rehearsing for the show, and he matches
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
(41:01):
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. Also,
there was a cringey photo. A photo has surfaced today
showing Tweeden asleep on the flight back home and it
reveals Franken groping her. Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but
(41:23):
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 bitter. I have
all people am aware that there is some irony in
the fact that I am leaving while a man who
(41:46):
is bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault
sits in the Oval office. When the New Yorkers Jane
Mayre 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. His mayor told NPR there
(42:06):
were holes in Tweeden's story. She had ever 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 ACHENDA. Most of them were in
the military, and they were right there and they just
didn't say a woy she saw it. As mayor pointed out,
(42:27):
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,
k ABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden is
(42:50):
a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh, and
k ABC 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 the story. He's not,
(43:10):
but he isn't the villain either. Hyperpolarized 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,
(43:30):
during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. Here tonight is a special man beloved by
millions of Americans, who just received a Stage four advanced
cancer diagnosis. This is not good news. But what is
(43:54):
good news is that he is the greatest fighter and
winner that you will ever meet. Limbaugh was dying of
lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering in the political wilderness.
All that year, Trump and Limb kept saying that Democrats
were going to steal the twenty twenty election, but stealing
elections was a go pack golden oldie, a two knute
(44:17):
Gingridge had played back in nineteen eighty eight. They're gonna
buy a registration, They're gonna buy votes, They're gonna turn
out votes, They're gonna steal votes. They're gonna do anything
they can. Now you have to understand that, stop the steal,
Gingridge said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty
he was saying it all over again. Two days after
(44:38):
the election, no one should be of any doubt. You
are watching an effort to steal the presidency. Ansis Joe
Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then two
months later, on January sixth, the next episode of The
(45:03):
Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many rovers of
doubt that dumped us into this sea of political gadab astrophe,
the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Against this backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
(45:27):
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 Limbo, though he was
having none of it. There's a lot of people calling
(45:47):
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,
(46:08):
Thomas Payne, the actual Tea Party guys the minute Lexington
and Conquered didn't feel that way. Rush Limbaugh died six
weeks after that broadcast. The King of AM Radio left
behind in America more bewildered and angry than ever, the
(46:30):
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 in the world. The Last
Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
(46:52):
produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey.
Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is
Mia Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by
Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
of Stellwagen Sympinet. Our research assistants are Kamani Panthier and
Lillie Richmond. Our full proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne,
(47:16):
Matthias boss Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Perella,
Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton. Special thanks to Brian Rosenwald
for his book Talk Radio's 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
(47:37):
thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz, Carly mcgliori,
Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig
and Daniella Lacan. Many of us out effects are from
Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation. If you
like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio app,
(47:58):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jillapoor.
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