RUSH: George in DeLand, Florida. I’m glad you called, sir. Thank you for waiting. How you doing?
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. I want to ask you to begin to understand the media and why they’re unhinged. You really need to go back decades, Rush, before Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio, and Fox News, my question is, “What was this fake news effect on America and American voters before you came along?”
RUSH: Well, there was a monopoly as recently as August 1st, 1988, when this program started. All we had back then… To me, 1988 sounds like yesterday. To a lot of people, it’s the Jurassic Age. But, to me, since that was the year I started, 1988 seems like yesterday. And in 1988, we had ABC, CBS, and NBC, and CNN had just started (it was five years or so in), and that was it. They had a monopoly. They had the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news on all three of those networks was identical. Oftentimes in the nightly news, the news events would be in the same order. There literally was very little difference, other than the specials they would do.
CALLER: So my question is: If you were harmed back then and you have this media that won’t tell your story truthfully, what was your recourse? What happened? And I think what… In my opinion, what happened is we withdraw socially and politically at that time, and before you came along and the conservative radio, that monopoly had caused harm to a lot of people. Now, you come along. Trump had not come along yet. People are getting some courage that, “Okay, there are some places that I can tell my story.” But when I saw Donald Trump at a rally in Daytona Beach. I saw this hope in people’s eyes of justice, because now, this justice that they were able to see ’cause the media no longer controlled that… And the media today will never, never change, because, if they do, they’ll realize that they have affected the lives of millions of people in the last few decades and —
RUSH: What do you mean they’ll never —
CALLER: — they won’t be able… Sorry.
RUSH: What do you mean, they’ll never change?
CALLER: Well, they’ll realize that they basically have turned themselves into being victimizers, not telling the truth when someone’s been harmed like in the military or through borders. By not telling people’s stories, they’ve actually helped — ’cause of political gain. They basically have become the victimizer and so they’re not going… If they realize that they’ve actually caused this harm — and that’s why they’ve basically gone unhinged, because they cannot come to that conclusion that they’re actually caused the problems in Syria by not covering it honestly.
RUSH: Okay, wait a minute. Now you’re getting… Let me see if I can translate this. They have a monopoly in 1988. You asked, “What could people do back then when the media was lying about them?” There wasn’t much. But again, the media, it’s always been left-wing. I’m gonna say something here that many of you might find — I don’t know — profound or shocking or what have you. Look, I remember it. I remember the media back then. It was all left, all the time. But it seemed… But aside from that, it was benign.
And what it took to overcome it was somebody like Ronald Reagan, who was able to go over the heads of the media and speak directly to people without the benefit or the need of the media translating or reporting or deciphering or what have you. Republicans won elections, of course, during this period of time. But during this period of time is when the left began to really entrench itself in the bureaucracy and in all of these nonprofits.
Like, they took over the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, you the name. All the Mellon groups. They were taking them over. Nobody saw it. It was nobody’s radar. They were embedding themselves in the unelected bureaucracy. And they were well aware of the monopoly they had, and, therefore, they did a fairly decent job of hiding… They didn’t hide the bias, but they hid the agenda. Now, when this program came along in 1988, that was the first assault on this monopoly.
And then as this conservative media grew — first with other radio talk shows, locally, then nationally — and then my television show hit for four years. And then Fox News hit three years after that. And then the internet blew up and we got blogs and conservative websites. And the magazines that were conservative went online. And there became a full-fledged alternative media. That would be us. And this destroyed the monopoly. The monopoly media had gave them opportunity for two things: What to report and what to ignore.
And what they ignored is what we reported. And that served to expose who they were every bit as much as documenting their bias. The thing that happened as a result of them losing their monopoly… They haven’t changed their ideological stripes, but they have thrown away… It’s gone now; there is not even a pretense of objectivity. They don’t even try to hide behind that anymore. There’s no pretense of fairness. It is all-out ideological warfare.
And so I believe that busting up the liberal monopoly of the news — the Drive-By Media monopoly — has, in part, contributed to the… (sigh) How should I phrase it? The ongoing ideological battles, the partisan divide. Because what it did — what the alternative media did — was awaken all of the Americans who were not fairly represented in the media. When this program started, practically everybody that called began by saying, “Thank you. I’m not used to hearing what I think in the media. Not nationally.”
So a bunch of people — average, ordinary Americans — began to have their thoughts, their opinions validated because they were all over national media and on websites and eventually on Fox News. And it gave them confidence and strength, and that’s when the battles began. The left and their news monopoly, lost their contentment. They lost the fact that they were benign. They lost the fact that they owned it just by waking up every day. It became a battle. It became an all-out war. And now I think media is a battleground, just as electoral politics is.
And it’s not going away any time soon. It’s not gonna change. It’s part of the evolution of this. And in the process, who the left-wing media is has been fully exposed now. There’s no doubt they always were what they are now. It’s just they were able to hide that for the longest time. But now it is known that they leave media and go to work for a congressman or senator and then go to work for a network and then come back. It’s incestuous.
They marry each other in Washington, DC, and they work at each other’s think tanks and so forth. The entire establishment of left-wing media and its related and associated businesses such as politics, has been exposed. And so it’s not nearly as easy for them. Here’s the bottom line: They used to own the shaping of public opinion. They owned it! There was no opposition to it, other than (pshew!) what might be local newspapers or in local media, but there was no competition for it.
Now it’s a battle every day for what they’ve always been. They’ve told everybody all these years that all they were doing was reporting the news, they were just out making news. They were not making the news. They were bending, shaping, forming, flaking public opinion. They were advancing the left-wing agenda, which was found in the Democrat Party. They were always doing that. That’s what this busting up of their monopoly has exposed: Who they’ve always been. They’ve sort of been drawn out. So the partisan nature of things has intensified as a result of their monopoly being blown.
I have to be honest about that, I think.