Recent reporting asserts the death of Rush Limbaugh, but anyone who turns on a radio knows this is inaccurate. The man ceases to breathe, but his spirit still echoes on microphones, tweets, websites and political debate all over America.
At its best, talk radio is the sound of informed citizens conversing with each other, exchanging honest conflicting views and maybe finding patches of common ground.
At its worst, it’s become a platform for debasing the culture, for turning civility into cruelty, for spouting lies, for racism and sexism and turning workable differences into emotional war zones.
For several decades, Limbaugh was the leader — in numbers and in spirit — of all those radio talk show hosts who sit in their windowless rooms and pretend to see the whole world in all its intricacies, and pronounce judgment in the most contentious terms possible.
If you think otherwise, then you didn’t notice Limbaugh’s final crusade, insisting to the bloody end that Joe Biden’s presidential victory was rigged.
Or you didn’t notice Limbaugh informing us that COVID-19 was no different than the “common cold” as half a million Americans went to their graves.
Or you didn’t notice him calling 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton “the White House dog” when her father was president.
Typical Limbaugh touch, picking on a defenseless little girl.
Criticism of Limbaugh isn’t about his politics, to which he was fully entitled. It’s not about right or left, it’s about right or wrong.
Around Baltimore, radio listeners of a certain age still remember the early talk show hosts — John Sterling, Gene Burns, Alan Christian — whose greatest strength was opening their microphones to listeners, to people who lived in the area, who struggled with jobs and rent and keeping their neighborhoods safe, whose children attended schools, who offered reflections of real life instead of bunko grievances delivered strictly to juice ratings.
Limbaugh changed everything.
Once in a while, I used to have an occasional drink or a meal with some of our radio talk show hosts. Sometimes we’d agree on politics, but mostly not. And it was OK, we’d put aside politics for a while.
But unanimously, they obsessed about Rush Limbaugh. He was the role model, he was the answer to big ratings and big money. And never mind the outrages he was spouting and never mind the effect on listeners.
And never mind the community conversations of talk radio that were transformed into marching orders and group-think dictates.
In The New York Times the other day, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wrote, “Rush’s gleeful oppositional defiance is what so angered the left.”
Really? It was all just a matter of politics? Or was it something else?
Was it perhaps his AIDS updates mocking the deaths of gay people?
Was it perhaps his questioning of Barack Obama’s birthplace, along with all the other racism, veiled and otherwise, such as telling a Black caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”
Or was it perhaps referring to women seeking sexual and economic equality as “feminazis?”
No, the left’s problem with Limbaugh wasn’t about “oppositional defiance.” This wasn’t about differences in economic policy or trade tariffs.
Limbaugh created a poisonous atmosphere. He made it safe for Fox News, and for all those other outlets that now steal Fox’s audience, by plunging even further into right-wing conspiracy theories.
And those outlets have given cover to a few generations of political hacks reveling in anything that puts us into warring camps, from Newt Gingrich to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Mark Twain once told us that reports of his death had been “exaggerated.” So are reports of Rush Limbaugh’s demise.
The man has ceased breathing but his art of the insult, his anger and outrage, his sadism masquerading as mere satire, his willful divisiveness to juice the ratings, unfortunately live on.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Allow me a few paragraphs of time travel, and let’s go back to Johnny Carson’s monologue the night after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. I’m paraphrasing here, but I think the joke still works 57 years after Carson first delivered it. “The good Read more
As he gets ready to leave for California, Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg looks back on his time in Baltimore and his 10 years writing for Jmore.
Michael Olesker pays tribute to WJZ’s retiring Marty Bass, a longtime fixture on local TV screens.