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Feb. 21, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:09
February 21, 2014, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
So compare and contrast.
Government monitors in newsrooms, no big deal at all.
Big yawner.
But a wolf in a hotel room in the Olympic village in Sochi, stop the press's news.
How about that, bro?
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Yip, yip, yip, yip, yah!
Who?
One big, exciting broadcast hour to go from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, Open Line Friday.
You are free to talk about what you want to do.
You just can't be boring.
I mean, it's not a license to do that.
But whatever you want to talk about, have at it.
Questions, comments, observations that you think nobody else is making, subjects that you think need to be talked about that people aren't.
Feel free.
Telephone number 800-282-2882.
You know, I have, strange as it sounds, I have known people who went to journalism school.
I have known people who graduated from journalism school.
I've known some people who graduated from University of Missouri journalism school.
Do you know what back in the day, I'm going back decades now, do you know that graduating journalism students had to take a course in advertising sales?
And do you know why?
So that they would know what it was that enabled a free press, so that they would have an understanding that it was taking place in a free market.
Now, what happens if all of a sudden that type of instruction is removed from the curriculum and journalism begins to be taught as something that is a nonprofit or should be a nonprofit, that there ought not be any profit in it at all, that it is so important and it is so crucial.
Why, look, they gave us our own clause in the First Amendment.
It is so crucial that we shouldn't even have bottom line pressures.
If young skulls full of mush at journalism school are not taught about the role of economics and the free market in sustaining and making a free press possible, what do you think the odds are that they'll be much more accepting of a government monitor or of the government enabling them to do what they do rather than the market enabling it?
And especially when the journalism professor can point to the First Amendment and say, look, we got our own clause in the First Amendment there.
So we are entitled to do what we're doing.
And we shouldn't have to make a profit.
And let me jump forward to when Paley, and I think it was Paley, whoever sold CBS to, no, it was not Paley, it was somebody.
Lawrence Tish of the world-famous Tish family.
Paley owns it still.
Okay, so William Paley, whose wife, Babe, was a brilliant shopper and great socialite.
When William Paley, well, that's what she's known for.
I'm sorry.
It takes talent.
We should not diminish it.
When Bill Paley sold it to Lawrence Tish, the first thing Tish did, anybody would do, was look at the bottom line.
Okay, where is this thing bleeding money?
What do I get a handle on Outgo?
And he saw that the CBS news division was bleeding money.
So he's a businessman.
The first thing he did was announce that we're going to lay off 250 people from the news division.
And Dan Rather had a cow.
Dan Rather and Charles Coralt and that whole crowd, they just went bunkers.
They went banana, what at BlackRock?
Oh, there was a roam.
It was a revolt, even though the broadcast center is not at BlackRock.
The broadcast center is right across the stage from where we did our show.
But BlackRock on 6th Avenue, there was a revolt in there.
It was led by Dan Rather.
And Dan Rather was running around saying, we ought not have these bottom line pressures.
What we're doing here is too important.
Why, we ought not even be, we ought to be immune from any bottom line concerns.
We ought to make what we make, and there ought not to be any concern at all what it costs.
And there was always, back in those days, there was a friction, folks.
Some of you, I'm sure, will remember this.
There was a friction those days between journalists in print and journalists on TV.
And the journalists in print looked down on the TV people.
They didn't think they were journalists.
They thought they were actors reading a script on a teleprompter.
They didn't think they were anything other than pretty boys.
Problem was the TV guys were making 25 times what the print guys were.
The print guys are all Atlantigans drinking, you know, straight, no high-brand scotch and bourbon while smoking cigarettes at the bar.
And the broadcast guys are at 21 arriving in limousines.
And the print guys were just livid, just absolutely livid.
And all the money the TV guys are making, and remember, they were nothing but pretty boys.
They weren't journalists.
They weren't reporters.
They didn't pound pavement.
They had producers that did all that.
They had producers and editors and cameramen.
They went out and gathered the news, and the reporters were given a script, put on the prompter, and they read it, and they got paid a lot of money.
So there was a lot of friction.
Then Dan Rather blew up at the bottom line concerns.
And the print guys all of a sudden said, you know what?
We better be in solidarity with them or the same thing could happen to us.
So the print guys, the New York Times print journalists sided with Dan Rather and the CBS guys who rebelled.
Even Tom Brokaw, I was in Sacramento.
This was in 1985 when this happened.
I was in Sacramento.
Tom Brokaw was in town to do a speech to some local group.
And I had a chance to interview him.
And I asked him about this.
I said, I don't understand how in the world Dan Rather thinks that news division is supposed to operate in the red all the time.
The people that own that cannot sustain that.
And he said, make the money in some other division.
Make the money in the nighttime prime time.
Make the money somewhere else.
He said, yeah, we need to have bottom line concerns because we don't have a blank check.
What we think is that these networks have plenty of other places they can make the money for us to operate.
Now, this, oh, they hated Tish.
They despised Tish.
Tish is no.
He didn't hang around long.
It wasn't any fun.
This guy was hated almost as much as I am, just to give you an idea.
Now, this enmity that exists between the print guys and the TV guys, you'll note that has gone away.
Do you know how they made that go away?
You probably would not have this registered, but to give you an illustration of how this went away, I'll give you two examples.
There was a program called the McLaughlin Group.
It started up at about this time, started up in the 80s.
And the McLaughlin group brought in print people, put them on TV, got them in the opinion journalism business, and they started making a lot of money.
They became stars.
They then sided with the TV guys because they became them.
And then PBS did their version of the McLaughlin group locally in Washington.
It's still on.
Gordon Elliott was the host.
Dr. Krauhema is still on that show.
I forget what it is.
And then, of course, all kinds of, you know, Robert Novak did his version of it on CNN, and they brought in print people.
ESPN has done it.
How many of you have watched on ESPN a feature, a 30-minute mini-documentary on, say, Joe Montana?
Look at who the guests are.
Look at the experts they bring in to add a little commentary here on how great Montana, whoever, it's always the print reporters from the papers that covered, in this case, the Fortiners.
And sometimes ESPN will put on reporters from the Newark Star Ledger sports page that happened to cover the 49ers when they play the Giants.
Now, the reason this was done was to rid this jealousy that the print people had for the TV people.
And so they brought the print people over, McLaughlin Group and other such, and the print people on TV started exploding in opinion guest slots.
They were paid television money.
They became stars, whereas they were just no-face bylines at their newspapers.
And so it was important in order to keep the unity between all branches of journalism.
And now, if you're in print, it doesn't matter.
You'll end up on the Fox 6 o'clock show with Brett Baer offering your opinion on it.
If you work at the New York Times, you can be hired at Fox.
You might be on the roundtable at Fox on Sunday, the roundtable on Meet the Depressed on Sunday.
But they bring the print people in so as to maintain journalism unity and give the print guys some money.
Because the TV money's always been much bigger than what the print people made.
I mean, you've heard of Inkstained Rich.
I mean, the print people before TV, they didn't make anything.
Some of the columns, I mean, there were always exceptions.
Some of the columnists did okay.
But now there is an almost, do you look at CNN?
CNN wouldn't know a profit if it came and knocked on the newsroom door and stripped naked.
They wouldn't see it.
MSNBC would not know a profit.
They are losing money left and right.
However, CNN's owned by Time Warner, and the money to operate CNN is made in other divisions.
So they're able to paper it over.
It's the same thing with MSNBC.
NBC is making money somewhere else that covers the costs of MSNBC so that whoever buys them in this Comcast will look at the bottom line and does not do what Larry Tisch did.
Does not say, you know what, we're going to cut the news division.
We're going to news division.
We've got to get rid of some of these expenses, MSNBC, that nobody's watching.
Nope.
They'll cover it somewhere else.
Or even if they can't cover it financially, they'll absorb the loss and get kudos from everybody else in the liberal community for keeping hope alive, for keeping the cause alive.
So it was a fascinating thing to watch.
And now journalism schools, they don't teach ad sales.
They don't teach anything about how the free market keeps the news business solvent.
What's taught is it shouldn't have to be that the government, that the news is as important as any branch of government because it's got its own amendment there, its own clause in the First Amendment.
And so profit and silly concerns like that can't be responsible for the news not taking place.
And when that happened, when the melding of the print and the TV guys took place, a giant juxtaposition or unity took place.
And that was the beginning of we don't have to make a profit.
We don't have to be concerned with advertising sales.
We don't even want to know about it.
We don't want to get anywhere near it.
You yuck.
All that does is get in the way of our objectivity.
We don't even want to know about it.
We don't want to go to client meetings.
We don't have to entertain advertisers.
We don't want any part of it.
And they're not.
Therefore, the bottom line with all this is that when a couple of J schools say, you know what, we think the government ought to put some monitors in newsrooms to make sure you're doing it right, it's applauded.
Because these guys in news already think they're in government, folks.
Because they've got their own clause in the First Amendment.
They already think they are.
They don't think they're journalists.
They think they are part of the government.
They think they're part of moving the agenda, the Democrat Party forward.
It isn't news anymore.
And on that, a brief time out.
We'll come back and get to your phone calls right after this.
Something else you may not know, folks, because it's not a big deal.
It's inside baseball stuff.
But in the early days of the news divisions, the soap operas were actually where the money came from.
The profits from daytime soap operas were so astronomical that the news divisions were paid for, were fed in part by soap opera profits.
And it's one of the reasons why you might see the same group of sponsors on As the World Turns and the CBS Evening News of Walter Klondike and Eric Severite.
I don't know.
I love this inside baseball stuff, but I'll tell you that the story of the unity of the TV journalists when that all got going and the print people, that was crucial to creating a unified journalist, so-called journalist community of today.
And it all involved finding ways to get the print people on TV and getting them paid.
And even after that happened, the print people still thought they were real reporters and the TV guys were just actors.
And to a certain extent, that's still true today.
And I do have to laugh when they promote whoever it is, the next anchor of the 630 Evening News.
And they say, yeah, 20 years reporting from Angola, 15 years reporting from Budapest, three years in Gaza and so forth.
It's all just a crock.
They're actors.
You've got to have a 14-inch part in your hair.
You have to look good in a trench coat.
It's a business.
That's one of the requirements.
Try being the best reporter in the world and looking average, and you'll never be seen.
Even today, with all the spots available on cable TV, I look at Piers Morgan.
Ann in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Welcome to the EIB Network Open Line Friday.
Great to have you here.
Hi.
Hey, Rush.
How are you?
Good, good, good.
Thank you.
I met you a while back at a Chiefs game.
At a Chiefs game?
Yes, you and George Brett were there, and at the time you were married to Little Bitty Marta.
That long ago.
Oh, yes, yes.
We were in the box or whatever.
Listen, I don't think this thing for the FCC started with the filet.
Do you remember years ago, and I'm almost thinking that Hillary was a senator at the time, but she was overheard.
Hillary has never been a senator of New York.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
She was overheard in a private conversation in the hallway saying we've got to come up with some legal way to quiet people like you.
Do you remember that?
It made such a ruckus.
Which time?
Well, it just seemed funny to me.
It's all falling together now that she's trying to run.
And then with the FCC thing, I don't know why.
It just popped into my head.
Look, there is no, I don't remember specifically what you're talking about, but I do know that Hillary has done that.
Yet, Hillary has, the Clintons have had me living in their brains rent-free for as long as they've been on the national stage.
And I do recall, I don't specifically, but Hillary has alluded to the dream of me not being around or being lassoed controlled or whatever.
Maxine Waters, Louisa, they all have Tom Dashel, the old puffster.
But this, I mean, you can, what you're trying to do is say, look, the original idea was this liberal, not the steak, not Mignon Fillet, Clybert.
But this specific proposal did come from Mignon Clybert.
Now, could she have remembered what Hillary said?
My point to all of you is, it doesn't matter which of them, because they all think it.
They all agree with it.
That's why you're not seeing any real pushback, except from somebody like Lanny Davis and Howard Kurtz.
But you're not other than that.
You're not really seeing any.
I didn't really start with the filet.
Look at here.
Open line Friday, and we have a nine-year-old named Jayden from Countover, North Carolina, nine years old, obviously calling to talk about Rush Revere and the brave pilgrims.
Hi, Jaden.
How are you?
I'm good.
Nine years old.
I'm happy to have you in the audience.
I'm glad you're out there.
It's great to have you call in.
What's up?
Well, I called to talk about the book, and I read it in about three hours.
Three hours?
Yeah.
Jaden, that's incredible.
It took me, it took me three days to do the audio version.
Of course, I had to do some parts over again.
You read this book in three hours.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
You like it?
Yeah, it was really good.
Well, that's cool.
So didn't none of it stumped you?
I mean, you're right there.
We wrote it for the 10 to 13 age group.
You're obviously a little advanced.
If you can do this in three hours, have you always been able to read fast like that?
Yeah, I love reading and history.
Well, that's great.
That is absolutely great.
You're way ahead of the game caring about things like that at nine years of age.
So what did you learn that you didn't know or that you found really interesting in this book?
That the Pilgrims went to another country from England, went from England to another country and then to America.
Yes, that is very perceptive.
That's another thing a lot of people don't know.
A lot of adults actually think the Pilgrims set sail from Britain and they didn't.
They had a stop in the earth and they also had a second ship they were going to use that didn't work out.
Well, that's great.
Are you going to get the second book?
Yeah, my dad's going to pre-order it soon.
Well, that's great.
It comes out on March the 11th.
And if you liked the first one and you're able to read that in three hours, you are going to devour this one.
I don't mean to say that this is, I mean, it's just really good.
If you liked the first one, this one's going to be just as good and maybe even better.
And it's the Boston Tea Party is the primary event that happens in this, but there are a lot of other fascinating things.
And there's a, we introduce a character that tries to sabotage things for Rush Revere.
And one of the school kids tries to sabotage the rest.
It's really, really good.
I can't wait till you see it, Jayden.
Yeah.
I can't wait either.
Well, March the 11th and you'll have it because your dad is a forward thinker and pre-ordered it, which is great.
Now, Jayden, I want you to hang on because I want to send.
Do you have the audio version?
You probably don't.
No.
Well, you do now.
If you'll hang on, Mr. Snurd, you'll get your address so we can send you the audio verse so you can listen to it.
It's a different—you'll hear me read it.
And it's a little different experience.
Same words.
It's not abridged.
It's the same thing, word for word, just read by me.
So don't hang up.
Mr. Snerdley will be right with you.
Three hours, he read it.
Nine years old.
Loved it.
You realize what a testimonial that is for Rush Revere and the brave pilgrims.
And he's sitting out there.
I can hear it in his voice.
He's sitting.
He can't wait for the next book.
He wishes he had it right now.
He wishes he could read it right now.
Before he goes to bed tonight, he wishes he could read it.
But he's not going to get it till March 11th.
Rush Revere and the First Patriots.
And he's right.
It's available for pre-order in all the usual places.
Books a Million, Barnes ⁇ Noble, Amazon, iTunes.
What am I leaving out?
Any number of places where you can pre-order.
Here's Marie in Dayton, Ohio.
Marie, great to have you on the program.
Hi.
Hi, Rush.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you.
You used to say that.
I'm super ditto.
Oh, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Are you still there?
Yeah.
It's such a rush to be on Rush.
I'm sometimes talking about it.
I know.
I just wanted to remind you of the- I've been where you are, I know.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just wanted to remind the voters that Hillary Clinton got the Margaret Sanger Award recently.
But what I really called about was that don't you believe that the administration is trying to provoke us into something like Venezuela and Ukraine?
What's going on there right now?
Wait a minute now.
Wait a minute.
I want to make sure I understand what you're asking.
Are you actually suggesting here that the regime might be doing things so outrageous to force some Tea Party people into the streets in revolt?
Yeah, I think so.
They've been doing the incrementalism frog and the boiling water thing for a while.
Okay, so but how would that benefit the regime if people pour into the streets in the form of protest of the regime?
Well, they've already got the laws on the books in previous administrations.
They can lock the hammer down.
Well, they've also got all the bullets, by the way.
They've bought up all the hollow points.
I don't know if you know this, but they have.
They've bought up all the yammo.
Yeah, the body bags and everything.
You know, if they can't provoke us, then at least they've gotten that much farther into their liberal.
Well, you know, folks, this is a risky area to discuss, but it is an interesting thing.
I'm not going to address whether the regime is trying to provoke anybody into any kind of public protest, and then from there, forecast what the regime would do about it.
But it is, nevertheless, interesting to observe that it isn't happening.
People's health care is being destroyed right in front of their eyes.
The regime can go out and they can brag all they want and lie about how many people are signing up.
And they can tell people that they're going to save $2,500 a year, and they can tell people they can keep their doctor and all that.
But the thing about health care is it's all lies.
People are losing their health care.
They're being canceled.
They are not being able to keep their doctor or their plan.
And their premiums are not $2,500.
One of the things that is the most important thing to a lot of people's lives, the most important thing to their health care and their health insurance is in a total state of disarray.
And people don't know whether they have any.
They don't know if their doctor is going to treat them.
There are all kinds of things.
And if you are in Washington and you are a member of the regime and you look out over the countryside, you don't see any manifestation of this opposition unless you look at a poll.
You don't see any anger.
There isn't anybody marching in the street.
There's nobody marching on Washington like there was during the Iraq war.
And by the way, about that, you realize now that the body count in Afghanistan is way beyond the body count in Iraq.
And where's the anti-war movement?
Where are the Cindy Sheehans?
Where are all of those people that were calling Bush a murderer?
Where are all of those people demanding we get out of Iraq?
Where are all of those people, Occupy Wall Street?
Where are they?
So concerned about the loss of life in the military, so concerned about an endless war.
Where are they?
They're nowhere, are they?
The anti-war movement doesn't really exist.
What are we to conclude from that?
Very simple.
There is no anti-war movement.
If there were an anti-war movement, it would be alive and kicking and protesting and marching on Washington.
And they would be demanding that Obama close Gitmo like he promised.
And they would be demanding to get out of Afghanistan.
And they'd be making sure the news kept track of the body count from Afghanistan every week, like we did in Iraq.
But none of that is happening.
But that's all that happened.
I mean, that was daily.
And even during the Bush administration, while all that was going on, there were books being written and movies being produced on the assassination of George W. Bush, if you'll recall.
And the anti-war movement had newsworthy figures that were on television all the time, Cindy Sheehan, people out in San Francisco.
But now they're nowhere to be found.
So maybe they're not really part of an anti-war movement.
Maybe all they are is leftist activists who will take any occasion during a Republican presidency to protest it and feed the news media with reasons to portray a country that's dispirited, enraged, angry, not unified, a country torn apart, a country roiling.
Now look, we have big scandal after big scandal.
We've got Benghazi and four Americans dead, zip.
We have a body count dwarfing Iraq in Afghanistan.
Zip.
We have one sixth of the U.S. economy has literally been destroyed in the process of moving it from the private sector to government.
And we've got zip.
We've got Barack Obama today saying the era of austerity is over.
I don't know if you've heard this, but he says, okay, we're through now with our budget cutbacks.
We've added, we've gone from $10 trillion national debt to nearly $17 trillion in Obama's five years.
And he's saying this is the era of austerity, and it's over now.
We've cut back.
Now we've got to really start spending.
Zip.
We have both parties willing to open the borders and allow a flood of illegal immigrants and their zip.
There's nothing happening.
We have people losing their jobs left and right.
And the government is saying, that's good.
You are liberated.
You are no longer a prisoner of job luck.
The first lady on Jimmy Fallon last night said that people who voted for her husband are knuckleheads for not buying something they can't afford, healthcare.
Here, grab soundbite number nine.
She called young people that voted for her husband knuckleheads.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, young people can stay on their parents' insurance until they're 26.
But once they hit 26, they're on their own.
And a lot of young people think they're invincible.
But the truth is, young people are knuckleheads.
You know?
They're the ones who are cooking for the first time and slice their finger open.
They're dancing on the barstool.
Young people think they're invincible.
They're not.
You know, life happens.
And now young people can get insurance for as little as $50 a month, less than the cost of gym shoes.
No, they can't.
They're knuckleheads and all that.
The president is saying, give America a raise while his policies are resulting in people getting fired.
The president is proud of Michael Sam coming out ahead of the NFL draft as homosexual, but he would forbid his imaginary son, Trayvon Martin, from playing in the end.
In other words, if you are the regime, whatever you're doing, the country's asleep and not noticing.
So why would you stop?
But if you're George Bush, there's protests everywhere in every city.
The country's made to look like it's falling apart, disunified, angry, roiled, at war with each other.
If you're the regime now, there's nobody protesting.
There's nobody upset.
The only thing you can do to find out there's anger is look at a poll because the media is not going out and finding people unhappy here.
The media is not finding the knuckleheads.
No, take it.
They are finding the knuckleheads.
The knuckleheads are happy.
They're satisfied because they believe in global warming too.
And the president's fighting it.
So if you're the regime, what are you worried about?
You keep going.
Nobody's going to protest anything you do if they're not protesting now.
Why stop?
Governor Chris Christie at a town hall meeting yesterday said that he hopes someday that he and Bruce Springsteen can be friends again.
He really hopes that Springsteen thinks he's a good guy because Springsteen made fun of him, you know, with Fallon on the bridge thing.
I'll have the sound bites for you on Monday.
I will remind myself.
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