Today, Explained - Rush Limbaugh’s legacy

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Author Nicole Hemmer explains how Limbaugh helped pave the way for Fox News, OAN, and Newsmax. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. You've kept her and Rush in your thoughts and prayers. Ladies and gentlemen, Catherine Limbaugh. Hello, everyone. I know that I am most certainly not the Limbaugh that you tuned in to listen to today. I, like you, very much wish Rush was behind this golden microphone right now, welcoming you to another exceptional three hours of broadcasting. Rush Limbaugh has died.

He was huge. Nicole Hemmer writes about conservative media. He transformed the world of political media by introducing this kind of political entertainment that would become the model for not just conservative talk radio, but for places like Fox News. She wrote a book called Messengers of the Right, Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. But he also fundamentally transformed the conservative movement in the Republican Party. He becomes a kind of kingmaker on the right, and he introduces this set of incentives to Republican politics that you need to be a little outrageous, that you need to be hardline, that you need to be a little outrageous, that you

need to be hardline, that you need to show fealty to this conservative media in order to attract all of those voters who listen to Rush Limbaugh's show. And the transformations we've seen in the GOP over the past 30 years are at least in part a product of the Limbaugh show. 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. So how does Rush get his start?

It wasn't a podcast thing, as far as I know. It was't a podcast thing as far as I know. It was not a podcast thing, nor was it really a politics thing. I mean, here's a guy who grew up in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and he came from a family of lawyers. He was supposed to be a lawyer, but he wants to be a rock and roll disc jockey. He wants to be a sports commentator. And those are the kinds of things that he does for the first several years of his career. It's only in the 1980s during the Reagan era that he begins to shift toward politics. He's fired from his sports commenting job. He gets a job reading the news. And they offer him the opportunity to do a little commentary on the side. And when he does

that, that takes off because it's so different from what people are used to. It's so outrageous that even though most of the people who listen to it hate it, they can't stop listening to it. And the station owners realize that they have something there. You're a quality talk show host. We've never had one this good. and it's sad to see someone like you go. I can understand that. So he's bouncing around. So he had started off in Missouri. He goes to Kansas City, Missouri. And then in 1984, after Morton Downey Jr. is fired from a Sacramento station, Limbaugh takes his spot. And so he goes to Sacramento in 1984, builds a huge audience there with his political talk. And then by 1988, he's picked up by a New York station

to be a nationally syndicated host. And that's really when he becomes a national phenomenon. The New York City school system won a close vote recently to distribute condoms on request to any high school student in the school system who wants one. The budgets are so tight they may have to cut 18,000 teachers. The message is that it is more important to give students condoms in New York City than it is to give them teachers. So he has all these bits, whether they're satirical songs or he does something called color abortions.

When he doesn't like what a color is saying, he just hangs up on them and he has the sound of like a vacuum and screams in the background. I don't know. He stops doing it. But he does a lot of things to shock and outrage his listeners. And people love it. People love and hate it. And those still count as ratings, whether they're tuning in to hate listen or people love it. People love and hate it. And those still count as ratings, whether they're tuning in to hate listen or to love listen. And people do start,

particularly conservatives, start to see him as somebody who's speaking truth to power, like saying the things that they want to say but aren't able to say. And so even at the same time people are hate listening to him, there's a whole other group of people who are tuning in and saying, yeah, that guy, he's funny. He speaks for me. He says the things that you're not allowed to say anymore. And that's the attraction to him in the 1980s and 90s. I think I just happen to be saying what a whole lot of people think but don't have the chance to say themselves. That's why they call me the most dangerous man in America. And at what point does this start to translate into political capital for him? Actually, really early on.

By 1992, he is sleeping over at the White House. Sleeping over? Yeah, in the Lincoln bedroom with Roger Ailes. Roger Ailes didn't sleep in the same bed as him, but they both slept over because Ailes was his television producer. He was in the president's box at the Republican National Convention that year. He was sort of the kingmaker by 1992. And he was the kingmaker because in the 1992 primary, he had initially backed Pat Buchanan. The problem is, I think, is the president's disposition and style and his basic lack of conviction and philosophy and ideas. They know that in the crunch, when it comes to politics in Washington, D.C., George Bush will not fight.

And I think they know Pat Buchanan will. Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh have a lot in common in terms of their politics. But for the Bush team, which was running for reelection and Bush's popularity wasn't that high, they saw Limbaugh as potentially somebody who could unlock all these conservative votes. So they did everything that they could during that 1992 campaign to win him over. And in doing so, they elevated him to this kind of kiss-the-ring figure among the GOP. And then Buchanan loses, Bush loses, Clinton wins. What does that do for Rush? It actually opens a big door for him because, first of all, he's not held responsible for

any of those losses. Like, even though he's being held up as a kingmaker, he doesn't actually make anyone win, but he gets this reputation. But the ability to attack Bill Clinton really makes the Rush Limbaugh that we come to know, right? He is constantly making fun of Chelsea Clinton, who at that time is a preteen girl in the White House. And he calls her a dog. He makes fun of her looks. He weaponizes misogyny against Hillary Clinton. This is new to the repertoire, ladies and gentlemen. He circulates conspiracy theories that the Clintons have had their friend Vince Foster killed after he dies by suicide.

And so all of those things, the insults, the misogyny, the racism, it all is there in the 1990s in the form of attacks on the Clinton administration. Disagree with her and you get savaged. Might even get a 10-page, 3,000-word memo written about you This is Rush Limbaugh, New York on the Excellence in... It sounds like he's the internet sort of before the internet. Yes, he's the first internet troll in a pre-internet era. It's very much this idea of triggering the libs that he's doing well before there's social media for everyone to do the

exact same thing he's doing. Wow. Whoa. That is some group of people. Thousands. And for this guy who sort of starts off in the Reagan era, it feels like the culmination of all of his conservative hopes and dreams and trolling really come to pass with the Trump era. I mean, absolutely. Rush Limbaugh is critical to understanding the Trump era, in part because, you know, remember that day in June 2015 when Donald Trump announces his candidacy and how strange and how bizarre his language sounded. When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time. And how improbable his candidacy seemed because he didn't sound like any politician you'd ever heard.

He was trading in offense and racism and all of these things that you thought weren't going to be the cornerstone of a successful presidential campaign. And for conservatives who had spent the last 25 years listening to Rush Limbaugh, he didn't sound strange. He sounded comfortingly familiar. He sounded like Rush Limbaugh, the insults, the nicknames, the sort of circuitous speech patterns. I mean, that is classic Limbaugh. And so for conservatives who were so used to that, there was something attractive and familiar about Donald Trump. And their relationship seems at least in some ways sort of symbiotic.

Absolutely. And you could really see that in the last year of the Trump presidency. It was a year that started off with Donald Trump giving Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, something that obviously elevated Rush Limbaugh into this sort of heroic level. Here tonight is a special man, beloved by millions of Americans, who just received a stage four advanced cancer diagnosis. And then later on that year in October, when Donald Trump was stricken with COVID, Rush Limbaugh turned over his microphone to the president because he was benched, couldn't go out. Why I can talk to you, Rush, the great Rush, and you are the great one, and I'm honored to know you,

but I can talk to you and I can spell out all of the dishonesty and everything else, and millions of people are listening right now. And for two hours, Donald Trump held forth on this so-called radio rally on Rush Limbaugh's show. And so you could really see how the two boosted one another throughout his presidency. And it's perhaps kind of fitting that Donald Trump's political career as president comes to an end and that Rush Limbaugh's show comes to an end

just a month or so after Donald Trump leaves office. And yesterday, when the news of Rush Limbaugh's passing hit cable news, guess who showed up to talk about it? He was a fantastic man, a fantastic talent. And people, whether they loved him or not, they respected him. They really did. For the first time, we hear Donald Trump's voice, something that we have heard very, very little of since the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. And I think that that, too, points to exactly, as you said, that symbiotic relationship between the two men. We focused so much during the Trump presidency on his relationship to Fox News. But his relationship with conservative radio hosts, particularly Rush Limbaugh,

had been a through line of his campaign in 2016, had been a through line of his campaign in 2016, had been a through line of his presidency because he was reaching a much, much, much bigger audience through those hosts than he ever could on cable television. This conservative icon is dead, but it feels like what he stood for, what he created, is thriving beyond his wildest dreams. Oh, yeah. I mean, we are living in a world that Rush Limbaugh made. There are dozens of three-hour-a-day call-in conservative talk radio shows.

There's Fox News and now all of Fox News' competitors. There are an endless number of right-wing websites, now social media platforms. The idea of a popular separate space for conservatives, something that Rush Limbaugh really helped to grow into something not just popular, but profitable. Limbaugh was the first test case of that idea. And since then, that whole world has just mushroomed into something enormous and totalizing and absolutely transformative of American politics. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. The views expressed by the host on this show are not necessarily those of the staff, management, nor sponsors of this station, but they ought to be. Nicole, you made the argument that though Rush Limbaugh has died, we still live in Rush's world. But that world appears to be going through some growing pains right now, huh? So we always knew that it was going to be a challenge for conservative media coming off of the Trump administration because Donald Trump so captured conservative media during his years in office. People who were anti-Trump lost their radio shows.

Over on Fox News, they pivoted to be a more pro-Trump network. They got rid of people like Megyn Kelly or George Will, eventually Shep Smith, and they put into place people like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. They highlighted folks like Janine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs. And so they had created this pro-Trump network, and that was echoed across conservative media. And so what does that space look like when Donald Trump is no longer its center? has experienced just kind of wholesale disgrace in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, the second impeachment. How do they rally back from all of that? And what direction do they go now? So what are the paths ahead? One of the interesting places to watch is going to be Fox News. Fox is one of the places hardest hit, in a way, by the election of Joe Biden,

and that's because of what happens at Fox News on election night. Arizona, are you 100 percent sure of that call and when you made it and why did you make it? Absolutely. We made it. Effectively calling the presidency for Joe Biden. And then a few days later, as the other networks all call the race for Joe Biden, they do that too. And that might not seem like a poison pill for a news network to report the news. But in the case of Fox, because it didn't display slavish enough loyalty to Donald Trump, they took it on the chin. And that wasn't just Donald Trump attacking them, because Donald Trump had periodically attacked Fox News throughout his campaign, throughout his presidency.

But he basically pulled the plug on conservative support for Fox. And there were plenty of places willing to fill that vacuum, places like Newsmax and OAN. And I tell you, we have some great new people. OAN. Newsmax. Fox News has now dipped from the number one cable news network, a spot that it has held since the early 2000s, to number three behind CNN and MSNBC. So that's going to be a hill for them to climb.

Tell me more about Newsmax and OAN for all the people out there who aren't familiar. They're like networks that outfox Fox News? Well, for instance, one of OAN's hosts, Chanel Rian, was given during the Trump era a seat in the White House briefing room. And she would always ask these questions that were like, Mr. President, your approval ratings have been the highest they've ever been, as well as the ratings on your handling of the virus. Yet there are some networks that are saying they're debating whether or not to carry these briefings live. Do you think there's a link between the two? Well, I don't know. I know that. Well, that's a nice question. Thank you very much. So there was on display this kind of no-news, opinion-first, Trump-first identity to these networks.

And they saw a real competitive advantage in that because Fox News at least has a small but notable news side that does news from a conservative slant but at least tries to be based in things like reporting and journalism. And OAN and Newsmax don't really have anything like that. They both are really just doing a lot of opinion programming. And Newsmax, kind of famously after the election, Greg Kelly, who is their top rated show, would go out and be like, There are people right now who are out there calling Joe Biden the president elect. Now, he's not my president. I'm not using the phrase president-elect. We're not calling this election for Joe Biden. We know that there has been fraud here. And that separated Newsmax from Fox News. And on shows like Rush Limbaugh's, across conservative media outlets, you heard hosts encouraging their listeners not to tune into Fox, but to tune into Newsmax and OAN, and a good chunk of them did.

So Fox viewers weren't tuning into Fox. That has been a real crisis for them because their identity is so rooted in not only being the conservative network, but being the network that everybody watches. And that's part of the reason why they're shifting to compete with Newsmax is because they're like, we got to get those viewers back. We can't be in third place forever because who are we if we're the last name in news and not the first? And in addition to all the competition they're facing, they're also facing like a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, right? So there is that, yes. We do have another breaking story that we are following this afternoon, and that is that a voting technology company has filed a lawsuit against Fox pro-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and it's alleging

a campaign of disinformation that has jeopardized the company's survival. In fact, Newsmax is under this same pressure as well, because even though Fox called the election for Joe Biden, it was still a place where the conspiracies about the election flourished. And one of those conspiracies focused on voting machines, voting machines specifically created by Dominion and a couple other companies. And so they created this conspiracy theory that said a company, which they named by name, had stolen the election. And they focused on this for weeks. They were having people on like Sidney Powell, the president's lawyer, to explain, you know, why Hugo Chavez had somehow done something to these Dominion voting machines, even though he's died, in order to steal American elections for Democrats.

And in airing those conspiracies, which were huge, especially on shows like Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo. They were defaming a company, a company with deep enough pockets to sue them, if not out of existence, to at least take billions of their dollars. Is there a chance that the Dominion lawsuit succeeds? Has it already succeeded on some level? I mean, it has succeeded on some level. I'm sure many of your listeners have watched that famous footage of Mike Liddell, the MyPillow guy slash insurrection supporter. We have all the election fraud with these Dominion machines.

We have 100 percent proof. And then when they took it down about three weeks ago. And this is after Newsmax has been served. Mike, thank you very much. Mike, you're talking about machines that we at Newsmax have not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations. We just want to let people know. So the hosts at Newsmax are just like, no, no, no, you got to shut up. You got to stop talking. You got to stop talking. Just talking over him for minutes. I don't know why they don't just cut his mic, but they're just like desperate for him not to say the word dominion on air. Okay. Mike, can I ask our producers, can we get out of here, please?

So that particular conspiracy theory has been cordoned off. Lou Dobbs has been benched at Fox Business. And while we still need more reporting to sort of see into all of the reasons behind that decision, he had been the top rated show on that network. And so his connection to this lawsuit does make it seem like his benching had to do with his unwillingness to stop talking about Dominion on the network because these companies are being sued for billions of dollars and Dominion has a really, really, really strong case. And so this has definitely got them scared. This turn in the Dominion story seems like this rare case of a company that actually has,

you know, the funding and the legal firepower to keep these so-called news networks vaguely honest. But it doesn't seem that reassuring because if you just take a step back and look at this conservative news landscape, it's just wildly successful, maybe even in a way that Rush wasn't because Rush could always be dismissed as, you know, that commentary guy on the radio, but these networks are providing a much more compelling brand of 24-7 conspiracy-laden propaganda. Yeah, there are two different models of conservative media. One is media for conservatives, and the other is media that is for conservatives but is also aimed at being in conversation with non-conservative outlets. One of the goals for Fox News that Rush Limbaugh never had was to

kind of set the news agenda for all of the other networks, something that it has done quite successfully over the past 25 years that it's been on air, and to present itself as, you know, the place you go for news and opinion, which was never something that Rush Limbaugh was doing. Because maybe you don't know much about Fox, and it says Fox News, you turn it on, you get updates on stories, and then you get a ton of commentary. It can lure you in in a way that Rush Limbaugh never really did. Although, again, he has a much, much, much bigger audience than Fox News. We're talking tens of millions of people who listen to a show, and the top-rated shows on Fox at their very best get around 4 million.

With the cable news networks that Rush influenced, you can kind of see the game. It's pretty transparent. It's ratings. Like, let's put the boldest conspiratorial stuff up front because that drives viewership. But was it that way with Rush? Do we have any idea what drove him and whether he found what he was chasing? I mean, we do know what drove him, and that was money. He wanted to become really, really, really wealthy. And he has been upfront about this his entire career. Like, he didn't get in this game to reshape the Republican Party.

He didn't get in this game in order to hobnob with presidents. He got in this game to become famous and to make lots and lots and lots and lots of money. And he succeeded. The contract that he signed in 2008 was an eight-year contract for $400 million. This is a man who became fabulously wealthy, peddling racism and misogyny and conservative politics for three decades. And in the end, given that that was his goal to become filthy rich, you can say at the end of the day he was pretty successful and he never really seemed to care what the cost was

no not at all in fact he saw himself as having a positive effect on american life because every day he had hundreds of thousands of people calling in and telling him that they were listening. Nicole Hemmer, she hosts a podcast called This Day in Esoteric History. Say it three times fast. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained, Today Explained, Today Explained. And one last note about the Rush Limbaugh show before we go. If you hear Rush on the radio, don't be caught off guard.

It isn't his second coming. iHeartMedia, which distributes Rush's show, is going to keep it on the air with archived clips and segments until, quote, his audience is prepared to say goodbye. Well, my friends, that's it. Yet another excursion into broadcast excellence in the can.