RUSH: This is Chuck in Cincinnati. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush! Cigar-smoker dittos to you, sir.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m calling regarding your ESPN comments earlier about the folks that were athletes that went through the schools or the colleges. I was a professor’s assistant at one of the major universities here in Ohio as a young fellow, and I taught a class to athletes and people that were not really qualified to be at university called “Sports Illustrated as Literature.” Needless to say, athletes loved it because it was an easy grade, and the university also paid for the subscriptions for each and every member of that class.

RUSH: (laughing) You’re kidding! (laughing) They even had to pay for their subscriptions? That’s like paying for the textbook.

CALLER: Yeah, exactly right. I have many other anecdotal situations for my tenure, and having learned what goes on in major universities, I opted for a responsible career in business after I got out of college, rather than pursuing an academic sheltered life. One of the other situations is I taught a class — and this just goes to show when they try to push people into school that are not qualified. I taught a class, History of Cincinnati, and one of the individuals, you could tell he didn’t belong in school, and here I get this term paper that was written wonderfully. Of course, after class I called him up.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold it. Hold it. Question: Was this guy an athlete?

CALLER: Yes! Yes!

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about that. I just wanted to make sure you haven’t changed subjects here.

CALLER: All athletes in this class except maybe one or two, but this was definitely an athlete. So I get this paper that was obviously well beyond his abilities from what he had turned in earlier. So I asked him to stay after class and I congratulated him on the improvement that he had made. But I saw that since it was only a four-page paper, I had asked him about this note that was left in parentheses that says, “(See illustration on page 43).” So I asked him. I said, “It was a great paper, but can you please show me the illustration on page 43 on your four-page term paper?” He stood there and looked at me, and he didn’t even know what “illustration” meant. I had the book that he had taken it from in front of me and showed it to him, and I said, “Does this look familiar to you?” But again —

RUSH: Did you ever find out who wrote the thing for him?

CALLER: Well, he just copied it out of a book. He just did total, straight plagiarism.

RUSH: Oh.

CALLER: Anyway, needless to say when I took it to the ombudsman who deals with this sort of thing, since he was an athlete, it was basically dropped and he had to write another paper and somebody else graded it. (chuckles)

RUSH: Yeah, because you had demonstrated bias and prejudice. So they had to get somebody in that was not of clouded mind to be fair and impartial in judging the young student athlete’s work. Well, I appreciate that. I’ve heard these stories over and over. Chuck, I appreciate it. Now, if you wonder what he’s talking about, I mentioned this kind of fast in the first hour. It is where, by the way, I got the stats over the number of abortions in the black population compared to the total number of lynchings in American history.

There are more blacks aborted every week in America that have been lynched in the history of the country. And if you care, I’ve got the backup to this. I’ll send it up to Koko and we’ll put it at RushLimbaugh.com. I’m sure the Drive-Bys are gonna have at me on this at some point. But it comes from a larger story about ESPN, which is what old Chuck here was calling about, and the author of the story is Mike Adams.

He is a PhD in criminology somewhere in North Carolina, University of North Carolina. He’s writing about ESPN. The headline is, “ESPN: The Enlightened Socialist Progressive Network,” and the piece actually started this way: “Watching ESPN is painful these days. What used to be a good sports channel is now a platform for bad pop sociology and ‘progressive’ political commentary. The commentary was in full force recently as I watched a sports commentator try to explain how the riots in Baltimore were a function of socio-economic factors.

“He had it wrong from the beginning. The cultural disintegration that is happening in Baltimore — and, indeed, all around the country — is not due to a lack of money. It is mainly due to a lack of education — or, to put it more bluntly, willful ignorance. There is a reason why…” This is the thrust of the piece, here. “There is a reason why you hear so many class warfare sermons from television sportscasters.” Who he’s talking about — I don’t want to mention any names, because, frankly, none come to mind.

But ESPN used to have… I know you’ll have noticed this. Not that long ago, ESPN’s experts in baseball, football, basketball were journalists. For better or worse, they were journalists. In fact, let me give you another little tidbit: Print journalism has hated TV journalism since TV was invented. The reasons are fame and money. The people on TV are richer, they are paid more, and they obviously have much more fame than the ink-stained wretches.

The print guys also resent the TV guys because they think they’re idiots; they’re not really journalists. They’re reading things on a teleprompter. Well, this could not work. ESPN had to find a way to build a bridge to the print guys, so they started hiring them and made them “expert analysts.” So on the one hand you would have the ESPN sports anchors — take your pick of whoever you want to name as somebody you remember or know — and then the expert analyst to come in and talk about anything going on in any league or at any game would be a journalist.

In addition, you have these ESPN documentaries like 30 on 30, 60 on 60, Five on Five, whatever it is, and all of the experts are print journalists. It’s not because the TV guys think they’re any better. It’s to get rid of this divide and also share some of the wealth. It’s a way of getting the ink-stained wretches — the newspaper guys, the print guys — some money. So there will be less resentment.

I mean, after all, ESPN does not want the sportswriters ripping ESPN all the time. You might remember that Howard Cosell had an ongoing, never-ending hate fest with sportswriters. He hated ’em. He thought they were the dumbest walking human beings on the planet, and he openly stated so — and, as such, they hated him. That predates ESPN. But this television-sportswriter divide has been huge.

ESPN’s tried to bridge it by hiring newspaper and magazine writers to come in and be expert analysts. But now, ESPN has gotten rid of… I mean, they still have the writers, but the writers are relegated to the website for the most part. And now the expert analysts are former players. They’re jocks. Almost every one. For example, on ESPN the other day, after the Brady report came out from Ted Wells — the Ted Wells report on Brady, Deflategate — the Big Money segment on ESPN took place between two former players.

Not journalists, but players.

Tedy Bruschi, number 54, linebacker for the Patriots, and Damien Woody, who played center and guard for the Patriots and the New York Jets and I think one other team, and it was an interesting bit of television. I mean, Damien Woody said, “Yeah, Brady’s so competitive I can clearly think he would cheat like this.” And Bruschi said, “Tom Brady’s a friend of mine, a personal friend of mine. I know Tom Brady. Tom Brady is an honorable man with dignity. He would never knowingly do anything like this.” And they went at it back and forth.

The point of this piece here, by good old Mike Adams, is that these commentators on ESPN now are no longer journalists; they are student athletes who were not scholastically qualified to even be in college but they were there because they were playing a sport, they had to go through the motions of going to class, so they were given majors such as physical education, sociology. His point is that the reason there is so much progressive liberal socioeconomic diatribe drivel on ESPN is because of the woeful education of all the student athletes who went on to become pros who have retired who are now working at ESPN. You can supply the names yourself.

I mean, every time a named player retires, he’s given a job at ESPN and in many cases it’s an analyst job, and it’s prominent. Ray Lewis has become an expert commentator in socioeconomic. Ray Lewis has been on ESPN talking about what’s going on in Baltimore. Baltimore Ravens, University of Miami, I’m sure he was magna cum laude at Miami. Warren Sapp. Anyway, look, CNN went out the other day when this Baltimore thing first flared, did you see The Wire? Do you watch The Wire? Okay, seasons four and five, you know the character Snoop? You love Snoop, right?

Folks, if you haven’t seen this you’ve gotta get I think episode one 1, season four, where Snoop walks in to a hardware store to buy a nail gun. It is one of the most classic scenes in television you will ever see. I mean, the salesman is so white he’s Wonder bread, and you’ve got this murderer for one of the drug lords walking in looking like — well, can’t say thug anymore. But looks like a total, she’s a female, but just a total — well, the cornrows, she does, she almost looks like a guy. Yeah, ’til she speaks, could be either male or female.

She walks in and she starts looking for these various nail guns, and this guy starts giving her the various selling points. “Well, now, the DX-535 here, this is excellent. What are you, by the way, using this for?”

“Well, you know, man, we got a –” and here comes F-bombs and the N-word and what’s gonna be done with ’em and they’re being boarded up after they’re killed, and she can’t tell him that. As she emits the F-bombs, the N-word, he just can’t believe what he’s hearing, she finally decides on which nail gun she wants, he tells her it’s 600 bucks, she peels off money, he says, “No, no, pay for it up on the cash register.”

“No, man, no, man, you earning this, you doing far more than what –” and she peels off like 800 bucks and walks out with it, tells him to keep the change. He can’t believe it. Her buddy’s out there and she tells him the story about what a dork she had to deal with. (laughing) It’s classic. Anyway, CNN brought her on as an expert to explain what had gone wrong with Freddie Gray. Snoop was a featured guest. Snoop’s got her own Web page. Just as an actress, I love Snoop. That scene, I have that scene separated. I actually got my iPhone, I was playing this scene on my big screen TV, I went and just videotaped it so I don’t have to load up the whole episode to watch that.

I found another one of those. There’s a movie out called The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg. John Goodman — have you seen this? I showed Snerdley — John Goodman, Fred Flintstone, John Goodman, comedic act, plays the meanest, most vicious looking loan shark you have ever seen. He’s shaved his head. He doesn’t even look like himself. And this Wahlberg guy shows up, he’s The Gambler, and he needs money to stay alive, and the terms that Goodman sets and the facial expressions. I rewound that scene 10 times to watch it, just the facial expressions that Goodman was able to manifest. I’ve got that in my photos file, too.

But anyway, Snoop was on CNN as an expert in Baltimore, the whole point here is, if I can circle back to this, is that ESPN has become this home of far-left liberal socialism because the student athletes were only educated in left-wing sociology, and that’s the extent of their education.