RUSH: Apparently, Carville just blew up, went off the rails defending Hillary and her e-mail scandal. And he went so far as to accuse the New York Times of reporting from right-wing talking points. We don’t have the audio of this because it happened on MSNBC, and we have a ban, I have a ban on all audio from MSNBC. And again, that ban has worked. By not giving MSNBC any publicity beyond what they can generate themselves, their audience has plunged. There is nobody watching.

And did you see, there’s a new poll out — oh, and this just irritates the Drive-By Media, that Fox News is now the mainstream media, is the way the poll reports it. More Americans trust Fox News than any other news network. The number that Fox garners is 29%. They’re ahead of CNN. They are ahead of all the other TV cable news networks.

I think it’s a Quinnipiac poll. I don’t have it right in front of me. And the excuse given, “Well, yeah, but 58% of Fox’s audience is Republican, so what do you think they’re gonna say?” Doesn’t matter. That’s mainstream audience. Fox News has become the most trusted.

I wonder, these people at CNN, for example, when this kind of thing happens, and there’s been a lot of it happening lately, I mean, we’re getting story after story about CNN’s audience plunging, hardly anybody watching. Ditto MSNBC. And Fox is just running away with everything and now with the credibility polls as well, the integrity, believability, honesty, credibility polls as well. And when you look at CNN people, when you talk about this, it is clear that they are so arrogant they are in denial about this.

The way they deal with this, they tell themselves that Fox is not even in the real world and that the Fox audience is not even in the real world. It’s all Fox and its audience is a bunch of extreme kooks, the fringe of American society, the fringe of American politics. CNN people lie to themselves. They still tell themselves that they are the network of record. They still tell themselves that they own integrity and character and honesty and all this. You can see it. I can see it. I know how to spot the personality character traits when I’m watching this stuff, and that’s how they do it.

You know, I’ve asked often on this program, “How do you work there and deal with the fact that nobody’s watching?” I mean, the whole point of getting into this business is to acquire an audience, and everybody on the air at CNN knows they don’t have one, they do not have an audience. They’ve got a national cable news network and their audience numbers in the hundreds of thousands, not even a half million nationwide. It’s pathetic. And here’s Fox blowing everybody away. And they lie to themselves. They tell themselves, as I say, that Fox and its audience are just fringe, way over here.

That’s the product of arrogance. I mean, they sit there and only they are doing the truth, only they are doing the real news. It’s a psychological thing. I don’t know how else they could do it. If I were told that my audience had become 300,000, I couldn’t come in here and fake it. That would be a clear sign to me that I’m doing something wrong. But CNN blames their audience. And MSNBC blames their audience.

So, anyway, there’s all kinds of indicators, if you can find them, and they’re not hard to, all over the culture that liberalism is not nearly as dominant and pervasive as it seems to be. It’s big, I mean, don’t misunderstand, but we outnumber them.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jack in Columbia, Pennsylvania, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. It’s great to have you with us, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thanks for taking the call.

RUSH: You bet. Earlier today you were talking about the rise of Fox News and the decline in CNN ratings, and I wanted to let you know I’ve been trying to help because, as you know, CNN is ubiquitous in waiting rooms all over the country, airports, automobile dealer service lounges, anywhere and everywhere you can think of. So I try to change that physically myself to Fox News whenever possible, and I requested it be changed. And I wondered what effect, if any, this may have been having on the ratings, because does CNN’s presence in all of those places count as —

RUSH: They don’t rate airport terminal buildings. That’s not only a passive audience, instead of active, it’s transient. I mean, you may have people sitting around watching. They’ve got no choice. CNN owns the concession to be broadcast at airports. So where CNN is buying coverage, essentially, like that, it’s not gonna be rated.

Now, I know you think there’s a lot of people pouring through there, but they’ve got no choice. They’re watching passively. It’s not the same as making the decision to turn on CNN in your home or to listen to CNN audio in your car if you have satellite. This is called passive listening, while you’re eating, drinking, walking by, and you may notice it. Look, everybody knows the ratings are pretty accurate on this. They may be off by a single percentage point here or there, but they’re pretty accurate, and you can tell everybody knows and believes the ratings to be accurate by virtue of their reaction. And CNN never cites all the viewers that are not tabulated that are watching.

It’s not a matter of dispute. That’s what makes the psychology of the CNN people and, to a lesser extent, the MSNBC people so fascinating to me. I can’t imagine what it’s like to get up every day, go to work at CNN and know that nobody’s watching. You know what they tell themselves? The important people are watching, others in Washington are watching us, news makers are watching us. I’ll bet Obama watches us, secretary of defense, other journalists watch us. The rest of the hoi polloi? Screw you. If you’re not smart enough to realize how brainy and right CNN is, it’s your problem. That’s what they tell themselves.

And they tell themselves people watching Fox are so stupid, they don’t even know they’re being lied to every day. Fox is just a bunch of propaganda. Fox is the lowest rung of the news ladder. It’s where all the dregs are. The people on Fox are just a bunch of blonde model factory output. Those anchors are not real news people, the CNN people say. You can’t be beautiful and be an anchor, and we at CNN prove it. And the same thing with the male anchors, just a bunch of cookie cutters or right-wing extremists.

That’s what they tell themselves. They tell themselves the right people are watching, professors, people at Harvard watch us, people at Yale. That’s how they get through the day. If you watch CNN very carefully, you can see that I’m right about this. If you watch CNN through a very analytical eye — I don’t care what the story is — ask yourself if you think that the way they’re covering the story, the way they’re talking about the story is actually aimed at John Q. Citizen, or instead if it is aimed at an elitist opinion maker, news maker, politician, think tank, university official or what have you.

It’s easy to see. They have disdain for stories of interest to people in flyover country. They revel in stories where people who live in the South and the Midwest end up looking like hayseeds and hicks. They love those stories. Well, they love making fun of the people that ought to be comprising their audience. They love belittling the people that ought to be their audience, ought to be their target audience, ’cause there are far more down to earth real Americans than there are people in the faculty lounge, or over at this think tank, or over at that opinion leader newspaper or what have you.

But they know they’ve blown that, and now I don’t even think they care. So the people that work there go in every day knowing — or they tell themselves that they are so good and so specialized that they’re just way above average people. Average people can’t possibly understand what they do at CNN. No, instead, we have to aim higher, we have to aim for the elites, and that’s who we do the news for, and we own ’em, and that’s their attitude about it.

Meanwhile, Fox is the exact opposite. You watch Fox, and you cannot mistake who their audience is, you cannot mistake who they’re aiming their programming, their news, whatever it is, you cannot mistake who they’re aiming it for: you. It’s all about connecting with the audience. CNN doesn’t. They connect with their audience, but you can put their audience in a thimble in relationship to the size of the country. It’s that small.