The New York Times Magazine's recent ridiculous puff piece on Rush Limbaugh continues a trend in which the mainstream media has shied away from any serious scrutiny of the nation's top-rated talk radio host.
It's a courtesy that Limbaugh has never reciprocated. After all, Limbaugh spends day after day on his radio program, demonizing The New York Times in the harshest language imaginable. After listening to Limbaugh's ramblings, you might well be under the impression that the Times is working closely with Al-Qaeda.
But the Times is hardly alone in treating Limbaugh with kid gloves. For such a major celebrity, Limbaugh has never faced any sort of real scrutiny from the mainstream media in his two decades as a national radio star.
It wasn't the MSM, for example, that broke the 2003 story of how Limbaugh was being investigated in connection with illegally obtaining OxyContin. It was the tabloid media (specifically, the National Enquirer).
Amazingly, in 20 years, there has really only been one in-depth look at Limbaugh (and it didn't come from the MSM). It came from author Al Franken's 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.
Franken's best-selling book exposed Limbaugh for the fraud he is. For the first time ever, the book brought to light Limbaugh's astonishing hypocrisy (such as the fact that he once collected government jobless benefits and the fact he never voted for GOP hero Ronald Reagan) as well as his crude, vicious hate speech (such as calling then 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton a "dog").
Big Fat Idiot also revealed how Limbaugh's program peddles outright lies and misinformation on a daily basis. Until Franken's book appeared, little of this information had ever been revealed to a broad audience, thanks to the MSM's silence.
Frankly, if the MSM had been doing its job, there would never have been a need for Franken's book in the first place. Readers appreciated Franken's job in exposing Limbaugh (sending Big Fat Idiot soaring to the top of the best-seller lists).
The MSM has always given Limbaugh a pass. To this day, he serves up a daily helping of outright lies, GOP propaganda and misinformation to his Ditto-Head audience of 14 million.
And Limbaugh isn't the only Right-Wing Hate Spewer treated with kid gloves by the MSM.
Recall how in 2005, Time magazine did a puff piece on Ann Coulter. The article's author, John Cloud, stunned many readers with his cover-story valentine to Coulter, as well as his contention that he "didn't find many outright Coulter errors" in her unhinged, rambling books. (In reality, watchdog sites like Media Matters have documented loads of outrageous lies in Coulter's shoddily researched writings).
And radio host Glenn Beck is yet another nutcase fringe right-wing extremist who gets a free pass from the MSM. In fact, in Beck's case, the MSM rewarded this hate-spewer with his own daily hour-long program on CNN's "Headline News." This, for a right-wing talk show host who once called Cindy Sheehan a "slut."
The creator of the progressive site, BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com, Marc McDonald is an award-winning journalist who worked for 15 years for several Texas newspapers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, before he quit his day job and set up shop in cyberspace in 1995. McDonald's articles have appeared in a number of popular progressive Web sites, including OpEdNews.com, BuzzFlash.com, Crooks and Liars, Salon.com, Progressive Daily Beacon, The Neil Rogers Show and The Raw Story. McDonald's Web articles have also been featured and reviewed by various national and international media, including CNN Headline News, the BBC, the Washington Post, USA Today and many more.
The author's complaint is valid - the NY Times itself fails to cover the who, what, where, when, why and how in balance, omitting, as Limbaugh himself does, the most articulate and qualified viewpoints from the opposition.
The Times generally however has been more balanced then the rest of the MSM, including the major networks and national weeklies in covering stories of interest to progressives. If you watched only ABC News, you might not even know Articles of Impeachment were filed in Congress against Bush for 35 different offenses.
In the end, Chavets' piece has enough detail about Rush to show how pretentious and morally distasteful he is, even if they didn't mention the #1 complaint about him, that he is a shill for the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us to rise against.
Limbaugh looked like a real jerk, despite the absence of criticism about his daily infomercials for defense and energy interests. A more useful article for Americans would have been an analysis of the result of trickle-down economics Limbaugh has suckered some in the middle class to believe in.
by
Gustav Wynn (60 articles, 38 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 283 comments)
on Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 11:19:12 PM
1 comments
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