One NAZI Gasbag Got 40 Years to Divide America in Two

[Kid Berwyn]

10. Rush Limbaugh Did His Best to Ruin America

How the right-wing talk radio icon corrupted the Republican Party, spread hate, racism, and lies, and laid the groundwork for Trumpism

BY BOB MOSER
Rolling Stone, FEBRUARY 17, 2021

EXCERPT...

First, a signature move: Belittle the story as partisan hysteria from the lamestream media while sneaking in a big, exonerating lie. “All of a sudden, protesting Congress is being called the end of the world!” Limbaugh sneered, making use of his rested voice. “A bloody coup attempt! Even though the only blood spilled was that of an unarmed Trump supporter.”

SNIP...

Cut to a schlub in a cheap white dress shirt, black tie, and hastily barber-shopped helmet of hair, already wiping sweat and grumbling about the TV lights, planted behind his desk and mic and interrupting the station’s young newscaster, Kathleen Maloney. She’s trying to do her five-minute, top-of-the-hour update — oddly (for 1990) while wearing a mask, because, as she explains, the host had warned her it could be dangerous to let his listeners identify her on TV as a liberal feminist. He was only joking, Limbaugh insists. “You said wear a bag over my head!” Maloney says. Limbaugh keeps threatening to yank her mask off, complimenting her beauty, and interjecting impatiently: “The news just holds up everything here! I’m trying to make the news worthwhile.”

It’s a fitting cold open to a broadcast that was, in those heady early days, all about disruption — and ratings. Limbaugh had blasted into national syndication two years earlier, at age 37, with a talk show that sounded like no talk show before: faster, louder, ruder, and way more opinionated. Also, very quickly, way higher-rated. “Talk shows had always been very polite, very gentlemanly,” says Brian Rosenwald, author of Talk Radio’s America. “Hosts were there to keep things moving along in an evenhanded way. You weren’t supposed to know the host’s politics. It was intentionally irrelevant. Before him, the only successful syndicated radio talker was Larry King, and that was a very different thing. You didn’t know Larry King was a liberal; you didn’t care what he was. It was about callers and guests. And now there’s this. A host who says, ‘I am my own guest,’ takes very few carefully screened-out callers, and tells you what he thinks for three hours.” As Limbaugh would later explain, “I wanted to be the reason people listened. That’s how you pad your pocket.”

It’s hard to convey, so many media eras later, what a phenomenon The Rush Limbaugh Show was. Within a year of the C-SPAN telecast, Limbaugh was beaming out to 530 stations, with 25 million listeners, and hosting a 30-minute syndicated TV show (also with no guests) produced by Roger Ailes, who would go on to launch Fox News in 1996. The pompous, motormouthed, giddily offensive Neanderthal conservative was a national curiosity, profiled on 60 Minutes, plastered on magazine covers (Newsweek: “Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?”), topping bestseller lists with a book whose title perfectly captured his approach to “news”: The Way Things Ought to Be. His moon-shaped mug smirked over Broadway on its biggest billboard. “People just can’t get enough of him!” gushed Barbara Walters.

CONTINUES...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rush-limbaugh-dead-trump-ruined-america-1129222/

So much harm done in one lifetime, thanks to mass media and the greedheads who run it.