{"id":21882,"date":"2004-03-12T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T07:10:30","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-10-16T17:48:54","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T21:48:54","slug":"there_s_no_right_to_be_heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2004\/03\/12\/there_s_no_right_to_be_heard\/","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s No Right to Be Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"
CALLER: With the new fines, I wanted to see your take on Howard Stern, because he\u2019s equating all these new regulations to Bush directly and he\u2019s urging his listeners to vote against Bush and vote for Kerry, and I\u2019m concerned that, you know, that his listeners aren\u2019t really educated and what we can do to, you know, find out what really is going on and get the truth out there.
\n<\/p>\n

RUSH: You know, let me tell you a little story. How do I do this? It\u2019s not that Stern\u2019s listeners aren\u2019t educated enough. How educated do you have to be to go to vote, except in Florida? The problem is.. There aren\u2019t that many… It\u2019s something way overblown here. We\u2019re not talking about that many people nationwide, #1, but that\u2019s not the point. Last Thursday — a little store here — last Thursday, right about ten o\u2019clock in the morning, a week ago yesterday, I\u2019m sitting here. I\u2019m minding my own business; I\u2019m bothering nobody; I\u2019m getting ready for an exciting show, and I get an e-mail from a woman on the op-ed staff of the Los Angeles Times, and she says, “Um, we would be very interested, and we haven\u2019t asked you in a long time, so we really think we\u2019re owed one.”<\/p>\n

She was nice, don\u2019t misunderstand my tone. “But we would love for you to tell us what you think of this FCC crackdown and Howard Stern,” and she gave me three options: “Is it the FCC finally catching up to where it should be, is it something else, or is it Bush trying to silence Stern?” I looked at that. Bush trying to silence Stern? What the hell is this? So I thought about it for about a half a — she needed it at nine o\u2019clock Friday morning. I said, “Well…” I thought about it, and I thought about it. Normally, I would have said, “No, not have enough time. Don\u2019t have enough passion about it,” but something made me say “yes,” and I still don\u2019t know what it was.<\/p>\n

So after the program last Thursday at three o\u2019clock, I jotted down what would be, in common parlance, a very rough draft just to get my initial thoughts down, and then I e-mailed those notes to my home Mac G5 dual processor computer. And then I put it aside, had to do some things. Got home a couple hours later, and I fired up my Mac G5 supe-processed computer, dual-processor computer, and in those two hours — you know, I have a bunch of filters on the Internet that send me news from certain sectors, segments, names and so forth, and it comes to my e-mail address, and I was loaded — there was all this e-mail in there from search engines.<\/p>\n

So I go through it, and, lo and behold, there\u2019s a new twist to this whole Stern-FCC thing. And the new twist is — and it actually happened Thursday morning but I don\u2019t know about it because I have never listened to Howard Stern and I couldn\u2019t now if I wanted to because he\u2019s been taken off the air down here. That\u2019s another misnomer too. He\u2019s just lost stations here, he can get others if others want to carry it after the contract period expires. Nevertheless, there\u2019s this whole new twist, and the twist was that “It was Bush, that Bush had decided he didn\u2019t like being criticized by Stern and had called Clear Channel management it and told them to get rid of Stern.”<\/p>\n

And I said, “You know what? I have been entrapped here. The LA Times knew this because it was the last option they gave me of the three.” I didn\u2019t know it when I said yes. I was prepared to do a thing here on indecency and abridgement of free speech and all this stuff, and I threw out all those notes. I merely threw out all those notes and I started from square one, because, folks, I\u2019m just going to tell you this — and this is what I wrote in this LA Times op-ed that ran Sunday. [Speaking to webmaster] I tell you what. Koko? Link to it, because this is the first time I\u2019ve talked about it. It\u2019s in the Houston Chronicle. It\u2019s been running all over the country now in their syndicate. You may have seen it.<\/p>\n

Let me give some full disclosure here. In the first place, Clear Channel Communications syndicates this program, distributes this program, on 600 stations here, and about 125 of them are Clear Channel-owned. The majority of the stations I\u2019m on are not Clear Channel owned. Clear Channel owns more than 1200 stations in the country, and what was it, 1400, something like that. Howard Stern is on six of them. Six! Six! And there were all these calls of censorship? There was no censorship! He got fired. It happens in this business all the time. Management can fire people for any reason whatsoever. Ask me. I\u2019ve been fired for using the word “therefore” too frequently. Management told me it “confused” the audience, didn\u2019t “promote communication clearly.” This was in Kansas City.
\n I\u2019ve been fired for playing “Under My Thumb” too many times by the Rolling Stones, and there nobody started making my case that I\u2019d been censored or any of this sort of stuff. When I heard that the latest theory is that Bush is behind this, I said, “Now, this has gone too far. This is an absolute crock and a piece of BS.” Because if Clear Channel is firing people for criticizing Bush, I should have been fired two years ago, and you people know it because you\u2019ve been mad at me because I\u2019ve been criticizing Bush on the domestic side of his agenda as long…<\/p>\n

Well, from the first time I heard that Ted Kennedy went to the White House to watch a movie and eat popcorn. And then here came the Medicare bill, and then here came campaign finance reform. That\u2019s what we ought to really be worried about. If we\u2019re going to start worrying with censorship, if we\u2019re going to worry about loss of free speech, campaign finance reform, folks, is it, because the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law abridging…” blah, blah, blah “…freedom of speech,” and they have. It\u2019s called McCain-Feingold. This business that Stern has been aced out by Bush? I mean, the theory is that Bush actually picked up the phone and called Clear Channel, and said,<\/p>\n

“I don\u2019t like what this guy is saying, get rid of him,” and all these left-wing fringe lunatics believe it!<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what all this e-mail was. These lunatics, “Can you believe what\u2019s happened to Stern?” I\u2019m reading this, and I\u2019m beside myself. The only thing that was missing was that Stern somehow discovered that Bush has an ancient relative who used to live on Mars. We discovered as you know that Mars was once habitable, out of water, and that this ancient relative used to work for Halliburton on Mars, and Halliburton destroyed Mars but the people there got out in time and came here and formed Halliburton here, and now we\u2019re destroying America by trying to get all the oil in Iraq for Dick Cheney\u2019s portfolio. That\u2019s all this story is missing.<\/p>\n

The idea that people are getting fired for criticizing George Bush is dispelled by looking at me, or anywhere else in this country. That is not what\u2019s going on here, and, you know, there is an important issue here, and I\u2019m not trying to relegate it to obscurity. But this left-wing Looney Toon conspiracy theory that has been evolving, that is to explain — I mean, I don\u2019t know why they don\u2019t stick with it. This is a clear decision that has been made by Clear Channel for whatever reason that they\u2019ve had enough with whatever the content was, and the thing about it that nobody is writing, “What about who the owners or the syndicators of Stern\u2019s show?”<\/p>\n

I mean, he can only be censored by government, number one. Number 2 his own company is not doing a thing to stop him, so what danger is he in? So in six markets, in six markets in this country, Clear Channel decided to get rid of a radio program they didn\u2019t like, and for this the world comes to a stop and we\u2019ve got a big controversy? Simple fact of the matter is that once the window of noncompete closes, once that noncompete clause closes any station in these six markets that wants to pick Stern\u2019s show back up can do it. It\u2019s no big deal in the sense, that Bush is… This is just nonsense.<\/p>\n

If anybody wants to know what\u2019s driving this — I mean, people are making jokes about it, but it was this thing at the Super Bowl, but it\u2019s not just that, folks. This has been going on for 15 years. Remember when the day after the Super Bowl, I came to this program and I said, “You\u2019re shocked? You\u2019re surprised? Why? Why should you be surprised at this?” It\u2019s like anything else, any other descent to depravity or any other cultural decay, at some point everybody reaches that point. “We\u2019ve gone too far now,” and what always happens, if I can give you this illustration, let\u2019s say that when everything is going…<\/p>\n

Imagine a meter, and when everything is going right, the meter, the needle is pointing straight up, 12 noon. But then we start going too far one way. Let\u2019s say we start going (just left or right, doesn\u2019t mean conservative-liberal here), but let\u2019s say we start going too far to the right, where extremism and indecency are on the right. And it goes far enough to the right, and finally we say, “Oops, gone too far, got to get the media back to center,” but we don\u2019t stop at the center. We go back a little farther to the left; we overcompensate in trying to fix it.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s at what we\u2019re doing now. Essentially we\u2019ve got people who want to go back to the Puritan days to fix how far right we\u2019ve been, or how extreme we\u2019ve been, rather than just go back to the center. And this is common. It\u2019s human nature; we do it individually, societies do it, and that\u2019s what is happening here. These fines are excessive. These fines are not going to stay at this level, and there\u2019s a way to avoid them. It\u2019s very, very simple, and it doesn\u2019t mean anybody\u2019s going to be censored. You know, the analogy is it\u2019s the public airwaves and it\u2019s just like being in a mall. You can\u2019t go start shouting all these offensive things in a mall because it\u2019s public, and people have a right to shut you up there, and that\u2019s how the public airwaves are.
\n Cable, you\u2019ve got to pay to go in there; and satellite, you\u2019ve got to pay to go in there. And so, theoretically — this is another point I made in the column — I mean, there is more cultural depravity on television today brought in into your home via a wire that there is on radio combined.<\/p>\n

And it wins Emmys, and it gets cultural acclaim, and we\u2019ve got artists — get this — named Andre Serrano who can put a crucifix in a jar of urine and put it on display at museums, and we are told that it is great artistic expression and that we must not prejudge it and that we must dig deep to understand the artiste\u2019s impressions and blah-blah, all this rotgut.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, we have a perfectly fine movie in “The Passion of the Christ” come out, “We can\u2019t have that! We must stop that! That\u2019s anti-Semitism!” Everything is all out of whack here. But if we\u2019re going to let TV broadcast garbage and smut whenever they want as long as it\u2019s on wire, and if we\u2019re going to put absolutely depraved debris — like elephant dung on the Virgin Mary at a Brooklyn museum — if we\u2019re going to say that that\u2019s perfectly fine because people have to walk in there on their own and see it, then broadcasters ought to have the right to not broadcast what they don\u2019t want to broadcast. It\u2019s that simple. I call it the market, and I just hope it remains a free market.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CALLER: With the new fines, I wanted to see your take on Howard Stern, because he\u2019s equating all these new regulations to Bush directly and he\u2019s urging his listeners to vote against Bush and vote for Kerry, and I\u2019m concerned that, you know, that his listeners aren\u2019t really educated and what we can do to, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThere's No Right to Be Heard - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2004\/03\/12\/there_s_no_right_to_be_heard\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"There's No Right to Be Heard - 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