RUSH: Here is Kim in Hartford, Connecticut. Great to have you. I’m glad you waited, Kim. Hi.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush, for letting me on.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’m a psychiatric nurse, and I wanted to say I loved your show yesterday. It was one of the most important shows you’ve ever had when you talked about how the left, the radical forces that are undermining America’s unity and how the psychosocial factors are being employed. The left is altering reality and they’re creating fertile fallacies at the same time. A fallacy is an untruth, and a fertile one is one that pays off. How do they do this? How do they do this altering of reality? Well, they do it with MMM: Mass Media Manipulation.
RUSH: Yeah, but how do they do that? One of the things I talked about yesterday as mass delusion.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: It was from a website called the Federalist, and they described it as mass delusion combined with propaganda. Mass delusion is the result of the effort. Propaganda is one of the techniques. But it mentioned things like you create a consensus of something that’s totally absurd. You get people believing something totally absurd, however that’s done, and then the people with common sense come along and say, “No, no, no. That’s totally wrong,” and they end up being the new kooks and weirdos. They are the ones society thinks are cockeyed and weird. You end up with a majority of people believing absolute BS on issue after issue after issue.
CALLER: Right. Well, it’s fundamental. First of all, you have to have people with some authority. You have to have them in right place at the right time, and they have to repeat constantly, and then there’s other people who will come in, and it’s a group pressure technique.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: That’s actually an old Czech communist technique where they put pressure, more and more people believe it, and it starts the ball rolling. Now, all of this is in the news. All the news agencies now — all the news outlets like Fox and MSNBC — get their information from the same sources, Reuters, AP, AFP, Christian Science Monitor. So that’s why I say you have to have the right people at the right place. So they start it, it goes out there, and people add to it. People with some authority. It works. People don’t check things out like they used to.
RUSH: Well, that’s true, but there’s something that’s part of that. Everything you mentioned… You mentioned AP, Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, it doesn’t matter. Every news agency basically is identical. Now, they may not report stories in the same order, and they may not report stories in the same day, but they all report the same thing about every story. You can be guaranteed a story on the presidential campaign is gonna lampoon the Republican candidate in every one of those news agencies.
It doesn’t matter who. It doesn’t matter who the candidates are. It doesn’t matter the campaign. You know that’s gonna happen. The Washington Post is gonna do it, the New York Times is gonna do it, the three networks gonna do it, CNN’s gonna do it, MSNBC gonna do it, all the newspapers are gonna do it. For the vast majority of them. There are some exceptions. That sameness ends up being its own authority. If everywhere you look in the media tells you the same thing, you don’t have to research.
I mean, why would you research it? If you look at the New York Times, it says X; if you look at the Washington Post, it says the same thing. And if you turn on any television newscast it’s the same thing you already heard, that’s research. And that’s one of the ways it’s done. Authority ends up being imputed simply because of volume. I mean, all of these different news organizations reporting the exact same thing.
Now, you have an organization that comes along that does not follow the trend and they’re called an outlier or they are referred to as alternative or some such thing. Folks, I’ll make a brief departure to try and illustrate a point. Last week my vacation was a guy golf trip, but on Monday of last week, I didn’t play with the guys. They flew off to Honolulu while I stayed on the Big Island. They played in a tournament; I stayed home. You know why? Because last Monday was WWDC, the Worldwide Developer Conference for Apple.
Since I was in Hawaii, I didn’t have to wait ’til 1 p.m. It started at 7 a.m. I had to find a way to make sure I was up because it’s a guy golf trip; nobody’s up at 7 a.m., except the guys that still haven’t made the time zone adjustment. That isn’t a problem for me. So I got up and I’m watching the WWDC, which is where Apple lays out for developers — the people that write apps — what’s new this fall in the iPhone software and the Mac software and the watch software and some of the goodies coming and all that.
And then they release beta versions of each platform at the end of the day for the iPhone, for the iPad. That’s, by the way, where big, big changes are coming. Now, stick with me on this for a second, ’cause it relates to what we’re talking about. But the iPhone’s gonna have the most noticeable changes. The iOS 9 and what they’re calling OS X El Capitan. It has some new features, but they’re largely maintenance. They’re tightening and making better, getting rid of some of the bugs that currently exist and streamline everything.
It’s gonna be good, all good. Anyway, there’s a new app coming. Apple has a new app coming on their iOS devices, the iPhone and the iPad, and it’s called News. Have you ever heard of the app Flipboard? (interruption) You never have. Well, Flipboard is a news app, and they have any number of them. And they create magazine-looking news stories based on the usual suspects: ABC, NBC, NBC, the tech blogs. So it’s just a different way of getting your news in one place. Well, Apple announced they’re gonna do their own news app. Now, wait. Wait just a second.
When I saw this I said, “They need to hire Matt Drudge,” because their news app is an aggregator. Flipboard is an aggregator. It’s one place you go to read the latest from the Washington Post, the New Yorker. You can select the sources that you want at Flipboard or Zune or any of these other apps, I think there’s two or three of them. Apple is gonna do their own.
Now, yesterday Apple posted job openings. They are actually going to hire human beings to put together this news app every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. They have posted ads for journalists and the requirements are, certain degree, certain level of degree, education, from accredited J-schools. It’s just gonna be the New York Times all over again. It’s gonna be, pick your poison. It’s gonna be left-wing news. It’s gonna be standard, ordinary, mainstream, whatever you want to call it, Drive-By Media. It’s gonna be curated by human beings, put together by human beings, and they’re gonna hire journalists, which, Apple’s culture is liberal, too, so you know what it’s gonna be.
The app doesn’t cost anything. It’s part of the operating system, it’s baked in. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to, it’s optional, but what separates it from all the others, all the others are put together by algorithm. Flipboard, which is what this is being compared to more than anything else, uses algorithm. They got people working there, but it’s algorithms and code that produce the content that you select from the sources you select. Apple is gonna have real people putting it together.
Now, honestly, when I read about this last Monday, before I knew they were gonna hire human beings, I said, “What is Apple?” Apple does everything differently. Apple stands out. What is the most successful news website in America, by far? It’s the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report has more page views, the Drudge Report has more clicks, the Drudge Report has more people looking at it every day than any other single website. Bigger than the New York Times, bigger than the Washington Post.
In fact, all of these news websites are constantly pitching stories to Drudge, hoping and praying he will link to one of their stories because Drudge is the primary driver of traffic to these other news agency websites. But if you look at the Drudge page, it’s everything. It’s not left-wing. It’s not right-wing, but it’s clearly different. There’s nothing else like it. And isn’t it fascinating that after 27 years the people in journalism, nobody has been able to create a competitor website that comes anywhere close.
And yet what is it? It’s just a guy scouring as much as he can on the Web and choosing to link to stories that interest him. It’s essentially what it is. And when I heard about Apple’s news app, the Drudge Report, they ought to buy the Drudge Report and bring Drudge in and make him one of their employees. It’d be the most popular, it would just kill, it would be different. And they’re not gonna do it. It’s gonna end up — I mean, they can highly tout this all they want, but it’s gonna be a reflection of the people they hire. And they’re gonna hire the same people that CNN would hire or the New York Times would hire.
Now, they’re trying to do something different like their new music app, they’re trying to hire human beings, deejays and curators and playlists and so forth to separate themselves from these other streaming music services that do it all by machine, by algorithm. And they’re trying to do it differently in music and they’re hiring people that are unlikely, like a deejay from the BBC whose expertise is finding new artists and giving them airtime. And they’re touting this big time.
So this news app, I’m just using this to make a point that it’s all the same. Everywhere you go, it’s identical. And that is what gives it authority, that no matter where you go, a story on Hillary Clinton’s gonna be the same thing: Hillary’s great, the Republicans criticizing her are screwballs, extremists, oddballs, weirdos. Or Trump is a clown, you name it, it’s gonna be the same no matter where you go. But Apple does things differently, and the Drudge page, I mean, if they want a news app that nobody else has got that’s gonna get clicks, it’s just waiting to happen. And they won’t even think of it.
But there’s a reason the Drudge Report dwarfs everything. Some people think it’s, “Well, you know, Rush, you say Drudge is conservative, but I mean it’s clear…” Well, you find a mixture of everything, the oddball, the kooky, the weird. But, I mean, billions of page views? It’s just stunning. And Drudge didn’t come up as a journalist. He’s not a J-school graduate, and yet he’s running rings around all these professionals and experts.
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