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March 28, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
March 28, 2013, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 podcast.
Gay marriage, what gay marriage?
Gay marriage, that's old news.
Nobody talking about gay marriage today, folks.
Everybody talking about gun control today.
You seen the media?
Have you seen the media?
It's amazing.
Now that the gun control uh matter, soon to come to the Senate floor again all day, the media on that topic.
Obama's got his big White House event going with his usual uh collection of human victims standing behind him talking about all these common sense proposals to keep our kids safe, and once again a clear illustration of what we get on cable news isn't news anymore.
Just because gun control legislation is going to come before the Senate soon, all day now, particularly on CNN and PMS NBC, all day it's about it's about gun control.
It's about the agenda.
But you know, folks, by the way, greetings.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh serving humanity behind a golden EIB microphone.
I have just come across a fascinating piece.
Now I have not had a chance.
It prints out the four pages, and I have a chance to just briefly race through this thing.
But at first perusal, it appears to totally substantiate a theory of mine that I've held from anyone, and that is about the American public, the population, and where it really does get hold of what it thinks it knows.
Where are low information people hanging out in the media?
And the purpose of this uh uh paper, it's uh it's by a professor at Princeton named Marcus Pryor, and he has produced an academic paper that attempts to dispel the notion that Fox News is responsible for all the partisanship in the country.
The Democrats, the rest of the media, the president of the United States all blame Fox, and of course me, for the partisanship for the uh the the divide that exists in this country, the fact that the culture and the society are rankled.
And this guy said, How can that be?
The professor, again, his name is Marcus Pryor at Princeton.
Uh I found this, it's in the Economist, The Economist.com magazine, and they they've written about his paper, and they talked to him.
And they say he's been chewing on this for the longest time because it it dawned on him that there aren't enough people watching cable news.
If you add them all up, there aren't enough people watching cable news to divide the country.
So where are they?
And here's the the basis as I understand it, and I'm gonna dig deeper into this, of course, as the program unfolds.
But his theory is that back in the days prior to 1988, if you go back to 1988 and prior, 20 years prior, 30 years prior, there wasn't cable news.
Go back to the pre-cable news days, or what was there?
There were three networks.
ABC, CBS, NBC, maybe throw PBS in there for the for the fun of it, but there were no cable networks of any kind.
The first cable network of any substance other than uh Channel 17 out of out of Atlanta, which was for Braves games, was CNN.
Likewise a Turner network, as was Channel 17 TBS.
But even then there was no entertainment cable television.
It was just CNN and 17, the the Braves, essentially, and whatever other programming that Turner put on that station.
So what all the even people who didn't care about news had no choice but than to be exposed to it because they didn't have anything else to watch.
You had the three networks and their nightly newscasts, and you had the Sunday morning shows, and then you had three to four hours of prime time, and you know the usual soap operas and things in the daytime, and that was it.
And then it all exploded starting in 1988.
The CNN starts, and then the explosion Of forget politics for a second, the explosion of cable television.
We had ESPN, which was on radio first.
And now look at it.
Now look at the cable television universe.
It is massive.
And the combined audience for all cable programming dwarfs now the over-the-air traditional big three networks.
And in many cases, individual and single programs on cable rate higher than network programs do.
Now and then, like the walking dead, for example, will rate higher than your average primetime offering on one of the big three.
Not all do, of course, but there are some who do mad men doesn't, but it's it's it's close.
But you you can pick the ones, you could name the ones that do.
Anyway, now, so goes the theory, people can avoid news all they want.
They never have to watch it.
They don't have to watch the nightly news.
They don't have to watch Fox.
Now you add to it Netflix and the coming fracturization, if I can make that the word up, with web television.
Things that you can pick and choose and watch on your mobile devices.
So it's a vastly different landscape than it was just 25 years ago.
And in these 25 years, people he calls the professor calls moderates as those people who really didn't care ever about politics, but they had no choice but then to watch it.
There was nothing else to watch.
The nightly news was it.
And in fact, if you go back and look at the numbers for nightly newscasts back in their heyday, they did.
If you add the three up, they were close to 100% of people watching television.
Now what are they?
I mean, they're they're minuscule compared to what they were, still sizable within their universe, but compared to the entire universe, they're infinitesimal.
His point is nobody, CNN and MSNBC's audiences are so small that you can barely measure them in the entire TV universe, and Fox is not much better.
Now, to the to the 10% of the population that really cares about all this, which include all of you, Fox has the lion's share, but you still can't say, this is the guy's theory, you can't say that Fox or Talk Radio are the primary, what would you say, causal agents for the partisanship.
So he says, where are these people getting what it is that they know?
And it's what we've always said here, the pop culture.
And he includes, in addition to all of these entertainment networks, ESPN, as a place where people are being subtly blanketed with a political point of view that in fact unaware of the audience unaware that it's happening to them, they are being politicized in a particular direction, and the partisan divide is occurring.
And in fact, folks, if you take the time, we've mentioned this too.
I don't care what website it is, I don't care what subject could be one of my favorite tech blogs.
It could be an ESPN blog, it could be uh an NBC sports, but any, go to any website that offers comments.
It could be the e-entertainment website.
It could be the one armed amputee is on Fourth Street website.
Could be any website.
You look at the comments, and you find the most vile, disgusting examples of humanity, and you look at it and say, what has happened to our country?
I know this has happened to those of you who have taken the time, if you if you're gathering information on a website and you and you do take time to scroll through the comments, the the the some of some of the stuff that people say there is just embarrassing and it's it's banal and it's it's it's it's disgusting.
And it occurs because these people are anonymous and they can say and do whatever they want, nobody's gonna know who they are.
They say things in the comments, they would never say face-to-face to anybody.
But what they say and how they say it certainly does betray the partisan divide.
I mean, even on an e-entertainment or a sports blog, the comments from people are just as partisan and just as vicious as you'll find on a political blog.
So I am fascinated by this.
I think the guy at Princeton is on to something.
And the reason that this may attract mainstream media attention is his premise that it cannot be Fox News that is causing the partisan divide, as the president says.
And as any Democrat says, and as the rest of the media say, the rest of the media constantly, you know, hand-wringing and lamenting.
What has happened to our culture?
We're so divided.
One of the premises of Obama's election 2008 was he was going to unite everybody, if you recall.
Obviously that hasn't happened.
But they are of the belief that a news business and alternative media such as this show and others like it.
Well, there are no others like it, but I mean conservative talk radio and Fox News, the alternative media, the conservative blogs, they have to be the culprits.
Because prior to our existence, everything was hunky-dory.
Everybody loved Democrats.
And everything was happy.
Everybody was happy.
There were nobody was upset.
There was no mean-spiritedness anywhere.
And to them it all happened with the advent of the new media.
So this guy says, nope, not possible.
We're not talking about enough people here.
Now it ain't going to make people like Ted Baxter happy to find out he's so insignificant.
Uh, or any of the others at Cable DV, but it's it's um nevertheless a fascinating premise.
And again, he's this this guy says that that the vast majority of people are bored by politics, they don't care about it, they don't understand it.
It doesn't make any sense to them.
It's as foreign to them as reading economic news written by economic elites for other economic elites.
You need a translator for it.
He says that's how most people understand political news.
It's just it's foreign.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's no logic to politics.
They're raised with citizenship 101.
And politics isn't citizenship 101.
It's who's got the most money, who can lie the best, who can run the most negative ads.
They say to hell with that.
I want to watch Walking Dead.
If I want to watch people get eaten, I'll do it for real.
If I want to see blood and guts, I'll see it for real.
I hope it is political stuff.
I don't understand it anyway.
And so they're not there, folks.
They're they're they're out.
He calls them the moderates, and he said back in the old days they had no choice.
They had, in the course of their television sets being on, they could not avoid the news.
Now they can.
And they're choosing to.
But they all still show up and vote.
Well, not all, but about you know, d decent percentage of them show up and vote.
What do we have here?
Voivalla.
We have the low information voter.
In part.
Now there are some highly educated, stupid people that are low information people.
Well, I want to be interested to see if this piece in The Economist gets any traction out there, because the headline, why Fox News is less to blame for polarized politics than you think.
As a blog post, but nevertheless, it's a blog post from The Economist, which is a highly regarded, respected English uh magazine.
So let me read in uh greater detail with a little bit more time to spend on it during the course of the program.
I'll do that during commercial breaks.
And I'll be back at you with hopefully a little bit more knowledge about what this article says as I say prints out the four pages and then in-depth analysis that you can only get here.
In the meantime, as you know, ladies and gentlemen, uh uh late last year we digitized the Limbaughter.
We created it, electronic version with its own app in the iOS app store, the Apple App Store, and the April issue is now available if you have not subscribed.
The Limbaugh Letter is a monthly, and it is the most widely read political newsletter in the country.
And it was always in print prior to last year, and that of course limited the the uh the audience, but now we've got it out there digitized, and the app is available.
Uh Limbaughter is the name of the app, and the April issue is now available, and back issues are available as well.
Um we have a regular Rush Limbaugh radio show app, which is just called uh Rush Limbaugh, but I just wanted to make mention that the April issue of the Limbaugh Letter just hit and is available for download.
You should have gotten a notification if you are a subscriber.
So we'll have some more on the gay marriage business today, even though the media is absorbed with gun control.
We'll have a little bit on DOMA, but we got other things that we're gonna touch on as well.
So it's gonna be as they say wide ranging.
And we'll get started with all the rest of it after we get back from this.
Don't go away.
Hi, how are you?
Welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Marcus Pryor at Princeton in this piece on media and the way it's uh fractured.
You know, the same thing is happening uh on the print side in uh in in news.
Nobody reads newspapers anymore.
Well, I can't say nobody, but I meant the the numbers are way down.
Everybody, though, used to everybody had no choice.
There were the nightly newscasts in the newspapers and the magazines, and that was it.
Do you know how many people get their news solely, solely on Twitter now?
You would be, I think, stunned.
Let me give you a little tech lingo here, or or the tech story.
There are a lot of people, well, I am one of them, who use something called RSS for news gathering.
Websites make their sites available via RSS Real something syndication.
And there are sites that will just constantly search the internet for the websites you want the latest posts on, and they aggregate them in what are called newsreaders, and most of them sync to a Google program called Google Reader.
I have a bunch of different RSS programs, uh, one for the desktop computer, one for my for my iPad, another one for the iPhone.
They all differ.
And I have a favorite, Mr. Reader, that I use on the iPad, but in my opinion, it's the best one.
But they all, for the most part, sync to Google Reader.
Nobody uses Google Reader, it's a web app, but they do link to it.
All these other RSS readers do link to it.
Well, Google just announced that they're going out of business.
They're going to close Google Reader, and it's got everybody that uses RSS a little worried.
They're going to shut it down in July.
And so the market is in the process of of uh filling what's going to be a giant hole.
All these apps that that link to Google Reader for their RSS syndication are going to have to find something else or do it themselves, which is tough job.
Google Reader does a big job.
Well, one of the things that is being talked about as replacing Google Reader is Twitter.
Now, what is Twitter?
Twitter is just people.
There, I mean, journalists are there, but so are just average ordinary people, and they read something they think is true and like, and then they tweet it out to everybody else and this massive amounts of stuff.
And some people, particularly young people, get everything they know from Twitter.
And just as an aside, I have been going back and forth on whether or not we need to up our presence on Twitter for that reason alone, not to send out tweets, but to have our stuff in that universe.
And I'm I'm still undecided on it.
But the point is on Twitter, a real accredited knows his stuff journalist is no better than Honest Basmikoyan who has no idea what he's doing writing things.
And young people are getting a lot of stuff from Twitter.
So this it's it's fracturing like crazy.
And for people in media, it's a challenge here to establish your niche in it.
Back with more in a minute.
Greg Pryor, uh Marcus Pryor, I should say, Marcus Pryor, Princeton University.
Essentially, when you read his uh abstract here, he's saying that it is easier than ever to become a low information voter.
Easier than ever, no question about it.
I uh I just checked something.
There is a Twitter feed that anybody can subscribe to called breaking news, and it is what it is.
But who posts it?
Who knows?
It has about six million followers.
Which means that everything on that Twitter feed is automatically sent to those people.
They don't have to go get it.
It shows up.
They have to log into Twitter to see it.
They still have to fire it up and use it, but it's sent to them.
Now, CNN has an audience of maybe 800,000 people, if you get my drift here.
Just one Twitter feed.
Now, who is it that's putting information on Twitter?
Well, half the people, at least, folks, don't doubt me on this.
Half the people on Twitter who are posting political news are political hacks paid by Democrats and their front groups.
know exactly what they're doing.
The left, the Democrat Party, has made themselves present everywhere.
I mean, the dominant media culture in entertainment, books, movies, television shows, sports networks is leftism, liberalism.
And so even the even the people who don't care about politics who couldn't care less about it are exposed to it, thinking that they are avoiding it.
And Mr Mr. Pryor here makes the point that it is often the low information people who end up being the most partisan.
And it's rooted in what they think they know that isn't so.
Let me give you a couple passages from his paper.
This essay examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates.
Although political attitudes of most Americans remain fairly moderate, and by that he means they're just ambivalent, Okay.
Evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved.
Proliferation of media choices lowered the share of less interested, less partisan voters, and thereby made elections more partisan.
But evidence for a casual link between more partisan messages and changing attitudes or behaviors is mixed.
At best, ideologically, one-sided news exposure may be largely confined to a small but highly involved and influential segment of the population.
There is no firm evidence that partisan media are making ordinary Americans more partisan.
And that's the thesis.
That is the point.
And that cuts right at everything that the Democrats and Obama are saying about talk radio and Fox News.
There is no firm evidence that partisan media are making ordinary Americans more partisan.
Because they're not there.
Mr. Pryor is also saying that now that everybody no longer has the news forced on them, only political junkies really follow it.
And only partisans are political junkies.
And so the universe of the truly partisan is pretty small.
And that the cable networks are not causing it.
They're not creating it.
Because they're not reaching enough people.
But the thought.
The Pew Center for People in the Press says that one-third of adults under 30 get all of their news on social networks.
It'd be for the most part Facebook and Twitter.
One-third of people under 30.
That's like getting your news from the insane asylum.
And I'm I'm not trying to put anybody down or be uh accusatory, but what I mean by that is you've got people who don't know what they think they know, putting it all out there, being absorbed by a bunch of other people who just accept it, because it's there.
It's printed, so to speak.
It's published.
It must be true.
I see it right there.
It's just like people say, I saw it on TV, it's true.
I saw it on TV, it must be happening.
Wag the dog.
The movie create a war on TV that is not happening, but people could be made to believe is, because it's on TV.
But the thought that so many people get their news from from social media really is scary.
But this is how, by the way, I should point out this is how the drive-by is convince themselves that they're on the right side of history.
Because they live in the Twitter social media bubble.
And they come to believe that the crazies posting there represent Middle America.
I am convinced that that's what's happening.
The media is a uh like any other group of people.
Their universe is all that matters.
You know, we make jokes about the media that live in New York and Washington would need a visa to actually get into Oklahoma and would need a map to show them where it is.
You know, life outside of their universe, insignificant does it matter only where they are does it really matter.
Only where they are is it really hip.
Only where they are and live and work is life real.
Well, if they happen to be on Twitter or Facebook and they're posting back and forth to one another and they're getting comments from these low information people, that's what they're going to end up thinking is important and matters and what's dominant.
And so this cycle of creating and embedding and then exalting low information status is happening full speed ahead, folks.
Low information status among those who hold it is not what is considered.
They don't they're not aware that they are that.
That's just the opposite.
They think they know things nobody else does.
And as such, there's an arrogance about them, and on occasion a condescension to uh to other people.
Now this breaking news Twitter account that I cited, breaking news that that has five and a half, six million followers owned by MSNBC.
So MSNBC is reaching an audience, just not with cable TV, but they're finding a way to uh to do it.
This is how, for example, if I if I can use an illustration, this is how the drive-bys have convinced themselves that same-sex marriage is suddenly the only thing that matters to people because in their universe, at Twitter and Facebook, that's all that's being talked about.
So that's all that matters, and that means everybody to them.
If if if uh same-sex marriages is a big subject of the day at Twitter, Facebook, then it it must be that's America.
And there's it it it's it's all oriented toward what everybody thinks is hot and hip, the uh the latest uh that attracts people and focuses their attention.
So the breaking news feed on Twitter is owned by MSNBC, but nobody knows that.
Certainly not the people that are following it.
It's five and a half million and growing.
So it's a fascinating premise this guy has, and I'm sure that we could discuss this all day and keep delving into it and come up with other realizations.
But boy, I tell that it's it's not a complicated premise, and in fact, it's one that when you hear it, it makes total sense, and you ask yourself, why did it take an academic paper for me to realize this?
It's absolutely true.
The singular premise here that in the old days, prior to 1988, people had no choice but then to absorb some news is, Now, granted, it was it was news from a left wing standpoint, there's no question about that, but they were at least exposed to it.
They had no choice.
The nightly news ratings combined all three networks was close to a hundred percent of the viewing public.
Then there was the explosion of cable, and people who never did really like the news now don't have to watch it at all.
But they are still being influenced, indoctrinated.
They're still being propagandized.
Because you will find a dominant media culture in all of these ancillary programming niches.
And so the idea that here here's let me boil it down to its essence.
What Obama and the Democrats want everybody to believe, and it by the way, given all this that we've learned, we have to say that they've been pretty successful convincing people of this.
They want people to believe that it is conservatism.
Because after all, what is Fox News?
It's considered to be a conservative network.
We can argue about whether it is or not, but that's what perception.
Conservative talk radio, no question, conservative.
So the argument is that conservatism is what's dividing the country.
Not really Fox, not really talk, it's conservatism.
Because prior to the alternative media, there wasn't any.
And everybody was fine, and everybody was happy, and the Republicans were very pleased to have 135 members of the House and be constant losers.
Fascinating, isn't it, that the Republicans winning the House for the first time in 40 years happens at the same time that the media monopoly blows up.
So what they're telling all of these people on Twitter and all these people on Facebook, it's you wonder why the Republican brand is what it is.
It's the Republicans.
It's conservatives that have caused all this hatred.
It's the conservatives who are the bigots and the haters, and that's why the country's divided.
And this guy's premise is no, it's not.
Sorry, nice tribe, but it's not talking about enough people here.
Cannot possibly be the explanation.
And of course, the truth is the country has never been unified, folks.
There never has been a time where it's been idyllic and everybody loving everybody else and getting along with a dominant, vastly dominant, great majority point of view held by all the people of country.
That has never been the case since prior to our revolution and after it.
We've always been a royal culture that's part of freedom.
It's part of a constitutional republic.
You're always going to have political arguments at war doing battle with each other.
But back in those days, the left didn't have any opposition in the media.
And now they do.
And so they've got to explain it away.
How many people know, for example, we talk about the Limbaugh theorem and Obama and how nobody, well, a majority, issue by issue, a majority do not approve of Obama's agenda, but at the same time, those same people do not associate Obama's agenda with what's happening in the country.
The most amazing thing.
Obama's into his fifth year as president and not yet do people associate his actions with what's happening in the country.
So by that token, how many people know that Obama's Twitter account is run by his campaign.
Organizing for action, used to be organizing for America runs Obama's Twitter campaign.
Half those people, I bet you said more than half the people on Twitter following it actually think it's Obama.
Well, it probably is at the uh at the end of the day.
I gotta take a quick time out.
Uh the Republicans, it is a story in the politico today that according to Republican consultants, they are reputedly the source, or the source is for this story.
The Republican consultants secretly want gay marriage to become the law of the land everywhere to get rid of the issue.
Details coming up.
Don't go away.
Now, I am I'm not just to let it be said here, I don't know yet that I fully subscribe to Mr. Pryor's theory of the overall insignificance of cable news.
I don't think it's maybe he wouldn't describe it as insignificant, but his his premise is that the partisan divide in the country cannot be solely because of cable news.
Because they just don't reach enough people.
Now there is word of mouth.
People watch cable news, tell other people what they saw, but within the universe, he's got a point within the verse of people that admit to watching it.
It's a paltry number compared to everything else out there added up.
Lots of channels now.
Vast majority of them entertainment, certainly not politics, and added together, the audiences for those programs dwarf the cable networks, even combined.
But the point of where we are here, folks, no matter what news source we're talking about, I don't care if it's ESPN or if it's some entertainment show or if it's WG and uh Chicago or whatever, the news, whatever the out the news source is Obama.
Right now, the news source is the Democrat Party.
The news source is liberalism.
The problem is that many people consuming it have no idea.
They're not looking at it that way.
They're in fact they think they're avoiding it by not watching the news, by not watching cable news.
So if they happen to be reading an ESPN website or watching ESPN, and then then they see the dominant culture there is what it is, they are going to be influenced by it, but they're not gonna think that they're engaging in politics.
So they are being manipulated, they are being informed, they are being uh used, however you want to describe it, but in their minds, they're not watching politics.
So what they are consuming and absorbing is not in their own estimation political, even though it blatantly is.
It's just being hidden.
Anyway, I must now take another obscene profit timeout, my friends, but be patient.
We still have many, many, many broadcast moments left to go on the program.
That's right, the political.
I've got it right here, folks.
The politico is uh saying they found a couple Republican consultants who uh said to them, you know, the best thing could happen for us is if the Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage in every state.
And that takes the issue off the table, and we can't be bigots uh in the 2014 election.
Why don't we just give away every issue so it's no longer a problem?
And let's just cancel elections and say, Democrats, you are now in power in perpetuity.
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