RUSH: I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. There’s something about this that’s demeaning, this entire process of choosing the next pope. The media coverage of this is just demeaning it. Do you know how many journalists have been credentialed for this? Over 6,000. They’ve got all these networks and anchors and analysts and desks, and they’re all over there in St. Peter’s Square, and they’re all looking at the smokestack.

They’ll all tell you that they’re there because they want to be on site when history is made, and they want to be the first to tell you. So they all have their eyes on the smokestack. And CNN’s got a graphic up, “Expecting Smoke This Hour.” I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s just something cheapening all of this. I remember watching this when I was a kid. The camera wasn’t on the smokestack 24 hours because there wasn’t 24-hour news, for one thing.

You only saw the smokestack when there was smoke. You saw a five- or ten-second clip of it. I’m not suggesting we go back to that. I’m not pulling out the old fuddy-duddy attitude on you. It’s just the way it’s being covered cheapens the whole thing. It’s as though it’s just… I don’t know. I can’t describe it any better than that. I guess part of it is that I just know over half the journalists covering this hate this institution. They despise religion and the Catholic Church.

They think religion and the papacy is a joke in the first place, and so they’re over there, and in a way mocking this whole thing. Over half them don’t even have a rudimentary education and knowledge/understanding of what this is and why it takes place and why it is meaningful to people. It’s just the latest popularity contest, just the latest celebrity news. Of course to the people involved, it’s far more than that. There it is: “Smoke Expected This Hour.”