Rush Limbaugh, Michael J Fox, Mainstream Media

PILING ON RUSH

In Firestorm Over Comments, No Sign Of Calming





*** Now at Bay State Showdown: my urgent plea to Kerry Healey ***


After days of an unprecedented mainstream media attack against talk titan Rush Limbaugh, the firestorm over his reactions to Michael J Fox's latest political foray have yet to subside. By now, it's quite clear they aren't going to stop until Limbaugh is forced off the air in at least a few cities.

And the coverage isn't merely limited to the States, but has also gone worldwide, to places where most people have very likely never heard of El Rushbo.

Consider it a Mission Accomplished: shocked media consumers the world over get a taste of mean- spirited American conservatives at their worst. When even Britain's ultra- liberal Guardian is in the mix, you know this is more about partisanship than anything else.

And in Boston, as well as other cities, reporters looked for opportunities to get other talk hosts to join in the piling- on effort, calling it a "civil war" within the medium:

The furor over Rush Limbaugh’s verbal broadside against Michael J. Fox has touched off a civil war among talk jocks nationwide, with some rushing to the conservative talkmeister’s defense and others saying he leaped way over the line.

Even fellow talk jocks Scott Allen Miller and John DePetro on Boston’s WRKO - where Limbaugh’s show is heard 12 to 3 p.m. weekdays - said the right-wing yakker went too far when he mimicked Fox, who has Parkinson’s disease, and slammed the actor for supporting Democrats.

“When I first heard what Rush said about Michael J. Fox, my first reaction was, ‘Wow, what an (expletive),’ ” Miller said after yesterday’s show.

Fox is appearing in ads for several Democrats who support stem cell research. During the TV spots, the 45-year-old Fox violently shakes and sways - symptoms of Parkinson’s.

Limbaugh earlier this week claimed that Fox was “either off his medication or acting” during the ad. Limbaugh also imitated the trembling Fox, which was captured by the studio’s Web cam.

“Even if Michael J. Fox didn’t take his medicine, that doesn’t mean he’s exaggerating the effects of his disease,” Miller said. “It means he’s simply not hiding them anymore.”

Even so, Miller said most of the listeners who called his show took Limbaugh’s side.

Likewise, conservative ABC talk radio host Sean Hannity defended Limbaugh yesterday on “Good Morning America” and said the actor deserved to be criticized.

If only these reporters realized radio talk show hosts rarely back one another on much of anything! After all, it's a nasty business.

Add to that the fact that Limbaugh has spent the last two decades pretending other hosts don't exist and there is very little reason for anyone to defend him, unless they truly feel it is well- deserved.


A particularly telling example of media excess comes from the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru:

Yesterday I did an interview with CNN, which I was told would focus on how the stem-cell issues were playing in this year's races. I wanted to talk about how the Michael J. Fox ads, and the affiliated campaigns, were a) promoting cloning and b) being dishonest. The interviewer wanted to talk about Rush Limbaugh.

When the segment appeared, I got two comments in. I said that candidates such as Jim Talent were not going to be hurt by the controversy over Rush Limbaugh's remarks, however "foolish" and "unhelpful" they were. (At the time I was not aware that Fox has said that in the past he has gone off his medications to dramatize his illness for political effect.) And I said that critics of the ads should point out how they oversimplify the issues. I didn't get a chance to say anything about cloning, or the pro-cloning campaign's dishonesty. The segment ended with the reporter saying that Fox denied supporting cloning or egg farming.

They only had a few minutes for this segment, and they wanted to touch a lot of bases, so I'm not complaining about the snippets from my interview that CNN chose to use. But today they've been running the bit on Limbaugh with the emphasis on my distancing myself from his comments, and I do think that they're playing up the Limbaugh story in part to help their team in the elections.

For the left, it took quite a distortion of the truth to get to this desired outcome.

How is that? When knee- jerk anti- Rush sentiments are removed, he's really guilty of only one thing: jumping to conclusions on whether Fox had really "faked" his symptoms in these political ads for dramatic effect. And for that, Limbaugh has already apologized!

In talk radio, newspaper columns, cable talking head- fests and the blogosphere, making assumptions without the facts occurs every hour of every day, with few consequences.

But when we're talking about Rush Limbaugh, during a period where liberals are feeling especially emboldened regarding their upcoming election chances, it's a whole different story. His longtime enemies, unable to bump him off after previous controversies, smell blood in the water this time.


Beyond that, where can Rush be properly criticized? Fox has in fact been stepping into more left wing political campaigning in recent years. And he did admit to forgoing medication in advance of his testimony before Congress in order to create a more dramatic effect.

In no way should Fox or any other Hollywood celebrity be able to enter the world of partisan politics and remain above criticism. And he's gone further: actually appearing in campaign commercials for Democrats. Fox has therefore placed himself firmly inside the fray.

In previous election seasons, conservatives would have been more inclined to defend Rush if they felt he was being mistreated. But with the right greatly unhappy with the Republican Party this year, all bets are off and he seems to be largely on his own.


That said, however, Rush still does a fantastic job of defending himself. From Wednesday's official transcript:

Now, ladies and gentlemen, yesterday during our discussion of the Michael J. Fox, Claire McCaskill ad flap and controversy, I warned you. I told you the big guns would be aimed at me and this program all day yesterday and into today, and that is the case. You have to understand who I am to these people. There's no reason they should like me. They ought to hate my guts. They used to have a monopoly before I came along.

For 18 years I have been hammering the Drive-By Media, often by name. It makes total sense they would despise me. It makes total sense that they would try to discredit me. I don't have any expectations of being treated fairly, and so I'm not disappointed. In fact, this is all kind of exciting, actually. I got a note from a friend. "Damn you, here you go again, becoming the focal point of election! Can you save some of this for the rest of us?" I said, "I'm not trying to do that. I'm just telling you what I think about what I see," but it's interesting to note, ladies and gentlemen. You've heard this program for the past two days. You've heard nearly four hours of detailed analysis of every issue involved in this controversy.

Yet after you hear it, you turn on the Drive-By Media, and you hear one line, you hear one line from what I said the past two days, and that line is, "he's either acting or off his medications," and that line is not even put in context. The reason I speculated that Mr. Fox might have been off his medications is because he's admitted he does that. I've got audio sound bites here today of him saying it. One of them to Diane Sawyer who apparently forgot it, that he had said that to her and tore into me this morning while interviewing Sean Hannity on Good Morning America. So here you are. You're out there. You're listening to this program regularly. You heard the in-depth analysis of all of this. You turn on any other media outlet, and you are stunned, and you are shocked, and you are in disbelief over how they miss it, miss it totally, miss it purposely.



You wonder, wait a minute, these are the people smarter than all the rest of us. These are the people who have been trained to go out and find the meaning and the truth in every news story out there and pass it on. Then you realize that that's not at all what they are about. I imagine many of you are rather pleased with yourselves today. You ought to feel a little bit superior to the alleged best and brightest journalists out there. You heard what I said.

They could have heard what I said, but they don't listen. They simply get their reports from the AP or whoever, but if they listen to this program, there's no way they could report on it the way they have -- well, take that back. Yes, there is an action line to every story in the media. I am a story to the media, and thus I have an action line. The action line is, I personify -- I'm the poster boy -- for all of the negative stereotypes that they have created about conservatism, and anything they think fits that action line, moves it forward, they are happy to report, but what did you hear me discuss yesterday? You heard the discussion about stem cells versus embryonic stem cells, versus the controversy over federal funding.

You heard about the Missouri deception, the Chicago deception, the Minneapolis, Minnesota deception, and the Maryland deception that the Democrats are engaged in here using the actor Michael J. Fox. You heard about promising cures that don't exist in the stem cell research area. You heard about research in other areas to cure Parkinson's or to reduce its effects that is working, involving gene therapy, involving the insertion of a virus in the brain. You heard about that. By the way, that research is being funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation. You heard all of that. You heard about which cures the smart money is investing in and not. You heard a number of things.

Do you wonder how it is the Drive-By Media misses all this? Do you wonder how it is they process information or why they process information the way that they do? It ought to be patently obvious to everyone, ladies and gentlemen. I'll tell you something else, as you will hear in the audio sound bites, advancing the notion, theory yesterday that the Democrats have a strategy of finding victims, either of illness or unfortunate circumstance, they trot them out as infallible.

They can say what they say with impunity. Nobody, even when they enter the political arena of ideas, nobody is allowed to respond to them, nobody is allowed to criticize them.

If your Radio Equalizer had one piece of long- term advice for Rush (in the unlikely event he would choose to accept our analysis), it would be this: spend more time acknowledging your allies on the right and it will be returned to you in spades when needed.

A lot has changed since the days when you completely ruled the roost. Plugging your favorite blogs was a recent step in the right direction, let's see a lot more of that kind of effort in the future.

In the meantime, don't expect mainstream media libs to back down until they've caused Limbaugh to lose sponsors and affiliates. This time, they feel like they've finally got him right where they want him. But since Rush isn't running for anything, perhaps it would be a great way for so-called "progressives" to waste their time.

UPDATE: HuffPo types gang up on Rush this morning. Meanwhile, Kathryn Lopez notes that the Republican response to Fox's ad is generating just as much attention.


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