“Safeguarding Privilege”: The Hidden Meaning Of Rush Limbaugh’s Apology
During his long career as the most famous talk radio host in modern history, Rush Limbaugh has only rarely apologized for his rhetoric — so when he does, it’s worth pondering the contrition’s deeper meaning. Was his apology last week for calling a Georgetown student a “slut” just a shrewd move to undercut a potential defamation lawsuit? Was it a frightened response to an intensifying backlash from advertisers? Does it prove the power of the liberal political organizations that have an ideological ax to grind against Limbaugh?
The answer to all those queries is yes — but none of those factors is the genuine news of the matter. Instead, what makes Limbaugh’s apology so important is its context. Capping off other similar brouhahas from across the mediasphere, Limbaugh’s mea culpa — however insincere — is significant because it is proof that America may be both setting some basic standards for political discourse and rejecting the right-wing shrieks about “censorship” and “political correctness.”
Consider what preceded Limbaugh’s apology. Only a few weeks ago, MSNBC announced it had terminated its relationship with Pat Buchanan, who had become a television mainstay despite the Anti-Defamation League documenting his long record as an “unrepentant bigot.” Just prior to that, Los Angeles radio station KFI suspended two hosts for calling Whitney Houston a “crack ho”; CNN suspended commentator Roland Martin for his homophobic Super Bowl tweets; and MSNBC suspended liberal host Ed Schultz for calling a competitor a “right-wing slut.” And before that, there was the seminal big-bang moment that kicked off the whole trend: the removal of Glenn Beck from Fox News — a decision that traced its roots to an advertiser boycott after Beck insisted that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred of white people.”
In all of these examples, as with Limbaugh’s “slut” comment, the speech in question set off a firestorm not just because it was ideologically extreme, but also because it was indisputably inappropriate. To paraphrase the jurisprudential terms surrounding pornography, it crossed the line from merely offensive to overtly obscene.
Of course, this kind of slander was tolerated for decades without so much as a peep of objection from the media powers that be. Thanks to that silence, talk radio and cable television came to be wholly defined by such political obscenity — a development that made spectacularly lucrative careers for hate-speech demagogues.
That downward spiral seemed destined to continue because any time there was even a hint of protest, the conservative movement’s powerful media intimidation machine trotted out self-righteous rants against “political correctness” and odes to the First Amendment. Looking to manufacture its own insipid version of “political correctness” that crushes dissent, this machine typically portrayed conservatives as victims, marshaling anti-censorship arguments to insinuate that bigotry, anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism are somehow entitled to a constitutionally protected place in major media outlets.
Not surprisingly, this same argument is now being made by conservatives in defense of their disgraced heroes.
“He has every right to his ideas, as we all have the right to our own,” wrote conservative Cal Thomas in an emblematic screed criticizing MSNBC for firing Buchanan. “It’s called free speech.”
It’s certainly true that all Americans have a right to their own ideas and to advocate for those opinions on their own. But having one’s ideas broadcast to millions of Americans over the public airwaves by major media corporations is not a right. It’s a privilege.
Limbaugh’s apology, made under pressure and designed to safeguard his privilege, concedes that indisputable truth. In doing so, the talk-radio icon is implicitly acknowledging a welcome change — one in which media executives, advertisers and the larger American audience are finally declaring that privileges can be withdrawn from those who violate the most basic standards of decorum.
By: David Sirota, Salon, March 9, 2012
“Honoring The Value Of Owners”: LDS Church-Owned Radio Station Stands By Rush Limbaugh
More than forty advertisers—from Allstate Insurance to Sears—and two radio stations have dumped Rush Limbaugh since he went on the offensive against Sandra Fluke, calling the Georgetown student a “slut” and “prostitute” for her advocacy of insurance coverage for contraceptive medications.
But not KTTH 770 AM in Seattle, Washington; a station owned and operated by Bonneville Communications, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As protests mounted Monday, a KTTH spokesperson defended Limbaugh, using a boilerplate statement from his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks:
AM 770 The Truth is committed to providing its listeners with access to a broad range of opinion and commentary. The contraception debate is one that sparks strong emotion and opinions on both sides of the issue. Radio can be and has been a great platform for a lively exchange of ideas as we seek to provide understanding. In this case, we wish Mr. Limbaugh would have been more civil in his treatment of the topic and his characterization of those involved, but we respect his right, as well as the rights of those who disagree with him, to express those opinions.
Here are the Limbaugh “opinions” Bonneville-owned KTTH would defend, as voiced on-air February 29 and March 1:
“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.”
“Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope.”
“She’s having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk.”
“Who bought your condoms in sixth grade?”
“So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”
All of this in response to Ms. Fluke’s efforts to testify in support of employer-provided health care coverage that includes prescription birth control medicine used by millions of American women not only for contraception but also for cancer prevention and treatment of polycystic ovaries and endometriosis.
LDS Church-subsidiary Bonneville International owns 29 radio stations. It is one of seven religiously-owned or affiliated national radio networks, including the American Family Association network (165 stations), Bible Broadcasting Network (37 stations), Educational Media Association (290 stations), Family Stations (67 stations), Moody Bible Institute (36 stations), and the for-profit Christian broadcaster Salem Communications (97 stations—for-profit Christian broadcaster).
No other religiously-owned or affiliated radio network in the country airs Rush Limbaugh—except the LDS-owned Bonneville International.
In October 2010, LDS/Bonneville-owned KSL radio in Salt Lake City dumped political commentator Sean Hannity, a move some viewed as an effort to align programming with a recently adopted corporate mission and values statement including the following points:
“I honor principles espoused by our owner in the products and services I provide.”
“I promote integrity, civility, morality, and respect for all people.”
“I seek to lift, inspire, and help others find enduring happiness.”
“I seek to instill light and knowledge in my work.”
How does Rush Limbaugh’s crass misogyny (and public humiliation of a civilian) honor the values of its owners?
BY: Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches, March 8, 2012
“Knuckle Dragging Haters”: Rush Limbaugh Plants Seeds Of Division In Scorched Earth Of Hate
Whenever a conservative is the subject of national scorn — as Rush Limbaugh is today with his leering Dirty Old Man attacks on a lone college student or former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a few years ago with his cheerleading for Dixiecrat racism — the Right Wing Noise Machine seamlessly swings into damage control mode.
One of the Right’s favorite tactics is to find some example, however tenuous, of liberals committing a similar offense that not only exonerates the earlier conservative outrage but also allows conservatives to call liberals hypocrites for their criticisms of them.
And thus, as New Republic’s Timothy Noah notes, with sponsors abandoning Rush Limbaugh’s golden microphone over his scandalous attacks on Sandra Fluke, all we are hearing from conservatives is that the liberal’s own record on civility is not squeaky clean.
Yet, as Noah says, “liberals get defined pretty broadly by the Right to include rappers, blogger Matt Taibbi calling Andrew Breitbart a “douche” in his obit, Keith Olbermann calling Michele Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” Bill Maher calling Sarah Palin a “cunt” and a “dumb twat,” and Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut.”
Pretty vile stuff. So, how is what Rush did to Fluke any different, conservatives want to know.
It’s different in two ways says Noah. First, he says, “all of the people who were subjected to verbal abuse by the liberal- or left-leaning blowhards and smart-asses mentioned above are public figures.”
And because they are public figures they are presumably accustomed to attacks like these and have the means to defend themselves.
Second, says Noah, none of the liberal media personalities cited by conservatives “is so feared by President Obama or any other Democrat that said Democrat would hesitate to criticize him if the occasion warranted it.
“That isn’t necessarily because Democrats “are braver people,” says Noah. “It’s because there is no rapper or liberal or leftist commentator or talk-radio host or comedian who commands anything equivalent to the knuckle-dragging army of haters that Limbaugh leads on the right.”
And this leads me to the more important point that Noah might have missed: The real difference is that right wing conservatives benefit from Limbaugh’s tirades in ways that liberals do not from the misbehavior of their favorite media personalities.
This is why Ed Schulz was able to take himself off the air without pay for a week for his momentary lapse of judgment and ill-considered remark about Ingraham while Limbaugh is constitutionally incapable of apologizing for three days of continuous attacks against a lone, brave college student. His business model won’t allow it.
All of those sad and lonely guys, pissed off at their wives and girlfriends, driving around in their pick-up trucks or SUV and shouting “hell yeah” whenever Limbaugh takes off after women, would lose all respect for Rush if he ever backed down. So he can’t. And that is why his “apology” to Ms. Fluke was no apology at all but was instead a rather badly disguised attack on the left, which he said would never bully one of its own the way they bullied him.
Apologies are usually delibered with humility not hubris. But this is just one manifestation of the difference between liberal and conservative media in which liberals are merely audiences for their media while conservatives are citizens of theirs — whether it’s Fox “Nation,” Hannity’s “America,” Rush Limbaugh’s “Dittohead Nation.”
Conservative media are about creating a new political party and a new nation not merely a ratings demographic. That is why conservative media figures always respond to criticisms from the left by citing the size of their audience — my tribe is bigger than your tribe so I must be right.
Thus, conservative media is culture-changing in ways that liberal media isn’t. So don’t expect Republicans to sign petitions to boycott Limbaugh’s program anytime soon because there is method to Limbaugh’s madness.
The reason Republicans don’t attack Limbaugh for his outrageous remarks is not so much that they fear his retribution (which they do) but that he makes it easier for the Koch Brothers and other Republican Oligarchs to plant the seeds of their “survival of the fittest” conservative dogmas in the scorched earth of anger and hatred and bigotry that Limbaugh — and Coulter and Hannity and O’Reilly — have plowed for them with outrageous smears just like this that serve to coarsen our political culture.
A liberal society — and by extension a liberal social program with the taxes on the rich that go with it — cannot survive in a harsh climate where empathy and compassion are dirty words that stand for values which have been obliterated altogether. And that is why Limbaugh and the others make the big bucks.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, Salon, March 8, 2012
“This Is Not A Game”: The Difference A “Different Decider” Makes
We may be headed for disaster in Iran, but at least this time we may be able to have a sane debate about it.
As the bleating of the Republican war caucus gets louder and louder, it’s beginning to sound a lot like 2002, when the Bush administration was treating us to daily news about the terrifying threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, ready to incinerate us all in weeks if we didn’t launch a war. Some of the same people who made the case then are making the case now that we need to start bombing Iran. As you’re watching them, it’s hard not to shake your head and say, “Are these people insane? Do they actually believe that it’s a good idea for America to start another war in the Middle East? My god, are we getting on this train to disaster again?!?”
But before we all get too frustrated, it’s important to remember one thing: now matter how loud people like Liz Cheney may shout (and somebody please remind me why anyone should give a crap what she thinks), no matter how much infantile chest-beating we get from the Republican candidates (sample Mitt Romney quote: “I will station multiple aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door”), this will be a very different debate from the one we had back then. The reason is simple: We’ve got a different Decider.
It was extremely satisfying to see President Obama, at his press conference yesterday, treat the grunts of those lusting for war with Iran with something approaching the contempt they deserve:
Now, what’s said on the campaign trail — those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not Commander-in-Chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war. I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.
This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.
Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven’t launched a war. If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk.
There are lots of reasons to be worried about this problem, from the horrifying possibility that a President Romney would feel obliged to follow up on the absurd things he’s saying now, to the unpredictability of Israeli actions, to the potentially awful consequences of an Israeli strike that occurs with or without Washington’s approval. But whatever else happens, in this country we aren’t going to see those calling for sanity get marginalized the way they were in 2002 and 2003. In any debate, particularly one on foreign policy or matters of war, the media will define the debate by where the president and the administration stand. He’s the one with the biggest megaphone. Ten years ago, that megaphone was booming, “They’re going to kill us! Be afraid! Warwarwar!” and that became the axis around which the debate turned, enabling the people who turned out to be right to be dismissed as loons whose ideas didn’t need to be part of serious discussions about Iraq. Today that megaphone is saying—and appropriately so—”Just calm the f–k down.”
For now, anyway.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 7, 2012
“Fundamental Dishonesty”: When Do Reporters Start Calling Mitt Romney A Liar?
Two days ago, Barack Obama went before AIPAC (which is commonly known as “the Israel Lobby” but would be better understood as the Likud lobby, since it advocates not Israel’s interests per se but the perspective of the right wing of Israeli politics, but that’s a topic for another day), and said, among other things, the following:
“I have said that when it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power: A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency. Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”
This didn’t surprise anyone, because it’s the same thing Obama has been saying for a while, in scripted and unscripted remarks alike, in both speeches and interviews. Yet later that day, Mitt Romney went out and said the following:
“This is a president who has failed to put in place crippling sanctions against Iran. He’s also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it’s unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
So here’s my question: Just what will it take for reporters to start writing about the question of whether Mitt Romney is, deep within his heart, a liar?
Because he does this kind of thing frequently, very frequently. Sometimes the lies he tells are about himself (often when he’s trying to explain away things he has said or done in the past if today they displease his party’s base, as he’s now doing with his prior support for an individual mandate for health insurance), but most often it’s Barack Obama he lies about. And I use the word “lie” very purposefully. There are lots of things Romney says about Obama that are distortions, just plain ridiculous, or unfalsifiable but obviously false, as when he often climbs into Obama’s head to tell you what Obama really desires, like turning America into a militarily weak, economically crippled shadow of Europe (not the actual Europe, but Europe as conservatives imagine it to be, which is something like Poland circa 1978). But there are other occasions, like this one, where Romney simply lies, plainly and obviously. In this case, there are only two possibilities for Romney’s statement: Either he knew what Obama has said on this topic and decided he’d just lie about it, or he didn’t know what Obama has said, but decided he’d just make up something about what Obama said regardless of whether it was true. In either case, he was lying.
The “Who is he, really?” question is one that consumes campaign coverage, but in Romney’s case the question has been about phoniness, not dishonesty, and the two are very different things. What that means is that when Romney makes a statement like this one, reporters don’t run to their laptops to write stories that begin, “Raising new questions about his candor, today Mitt Romney falsely accused President Obama…” The result is that he gets a pass: there’s no punishment for lying, because reporters hear the lie and decide that there are other, more important things to write about.
To get a sense of what it’s like when reporters are on the lookout for lies, remember what Al Gore went through in 2000. To take just one story, when Gore jokingly told a union audience that as a baby his parents would rock him to sleep to the strains of “Look for the Union Label,” everyone in attendance laughed, but reporters shouted “To the Internet!” and discovered that the song wasn’t written until Gore was an adult. They then wrote entire stories about the remark, with those “Raising new questions…” ledes, barely entertaining the possibility that Gore was joking. Why not? Because it was Al Gore, and they all knew he was a liar, so obviously if he said something that wasn’t literally true it could only have been an intentional falsehood.
That is not yet the presumption when it comes to Mitt Romney. There’s another factor at play as well, which is that reporters, for reasons I’ve never completely understood, consider it a greater sin to lie about yourself, particularly about your personal life, than to lie about your opponent or about policy (I wrote about the different kinds of lies and how the press treats them differently here). Because Romney is lying about his opponent and about a policy matter, reporters just aren’t as interested. But at some point, these things begin to pile up, and they really ought to start asking whether this dishonesty is something fundamental in Romney’s character that might be worth exploring.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 6, 2012
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