RUSH: Now, there’s something else happening out there, my friends, that is also funny as it can be. The Sinclair corporation owns more television stations than any broadcaster in America, something like that 173 TV stations. And Sinclair prepared a statement, slash, memo that they wanted every one of their news anchors to read on camera.

It was essentially a statement from Sinclair that they were not fake news. And it criticized mainstream media as fake news. And it assured the Sinclair audiences that they would get the straight skinny, that they would not get media bias, they would not get fake news. And the mainstream media is fit to be tied over this. They are outraged by this!

They feel sorry for the Sinclair journalists who have been forced by corporate to read some bogus statement and criticism of others in their sacred business, other journalists. And then where it gets funny is the Drive-Bys and others are running around claiming how illegitimate it is that all of these people that work at Sinclair were forced to say the same thing. That is just outrageous, that everybody that works at Sinclair was forced to say the same words.

Well, we’re gonna go back to the Grooveyard of Forgotten Sound Bites and we’re gonna find out who exactly does that and who has been doing that and we’ll find once again it’s the Drive-By Media that marches in lockstep.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Here’s the deal on Sinclair media. CNN reported last month, just a couple of days ago, maybe a week ago that Sinclair is mandating its local affiliates, 173 of them out there, mandating its local affiliates, all the anchors there read aloud a promotional campaign that condemns other news outlets for pushing fake stories. Never mind that there is a poll recently released that a majority of Americans — this is Monmouth University — found a majority of Americans believe mainstream news outlets are reporting fake news. A majority. I think that will coincide with Trump’s approval numbers going up, by the way.

So the Drive-By Media is fit to be tied. They are in meltdown over Sinclair wanting to act like real journalists. The memos that these anchors are being forced to read at Sinclair mentions that they are fair and that they are honest and do great journalism, not like mainstream media journalists engaging in fake news.

And so Trump has defended Sinclair. He tweeted that it is funny to watch fake news networks criticize Sinclair for being against bias. He said Sinclair’s far superior to CNN and even more fake NBC, which is a total joke. So funny to watch fake news networks among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair for being biased. Sinclair is trying to say we’re not biased, we’re gonna give you the straight skinny on everything, you can turn to us for straight-up news, is what Sinclair’s basically saying.

Jimmy Kimmel goes out there, Jimmy Kimmel who doesn’t know what to say when it comes to politics unless he talks to somebody in Chuck Schumer’s office first, Jimmy Kimmel says, “TV hosts parroting talking points are dangerous to our democracy.”

TV hosts parroting talking points are dangerous to our democracy. Well, let’s go back, and let’s listen to a bunch of TV journalists and print journalists parrot a talking point. This is 2000. This is 18 years ago, between July and August, after George W. Bush announced that he was going to name Dick Cheney his vice presidential running mate.

AL HUNT: He meets all of George W’s weaknesses, lack of gravitas.

JUAN WILLIAMS: We see the son, who is seeking some gravitas.

CLAIRE SHIPMAN: They were looking at candidates with gravitas.

STEVE ROBERTS: But he has the gravitas and you can sum it up in one word, stature.

VIC FAZIO: It may go to the gravitas.

JEFF GREENFIELD: We’re to use the favorite phrase, gravitas.

LESTER HOLT: This is a vice president who brought gravitas.

WOLF BLITZER: This will give some gravitas, add some credibility.

ED ROLLINS: I think the gravitas that Cheney brought to the ticket.

JONATHAN ALTER: What he gets is gravitas, a sense of weight.

BOB KERREY: He does not need anybody to give him gravitas.

MARGARET CARLSON: It means that, you know, gravitas.

MIKE MCCURRY: I think he also needs some gravitas.

SAM DONALDSON: To give gravitas.

ELEANOR CLIFT: Well, he brings gravitas.

WALTER ISAACSON: He does seem to bring some gravitas.

AL HUNT: It’s called gravitas.

MARK SHIELDS: A little gravitas!

JUDY WOODRUFF: You certainly have gravitas tonight.

SAM DONALDSON: He displayed tonight a certain gravitas.

MARIO CUOMO: I think gravitas is the word. Unfortunately for the Governor, you can’t graft gravitas. … He has gravitas.

RUSH: That was the voice of Mario “The Pious.” That was Mario Cuomo. So let’s count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 — 18 people here in our montage, and every one of them described George W. Bush needs to choose Cheney in order to give himself gravitas. Meaning some weight, some integrity, some seriousness, because Bush was seen by all these people as a dumb, stupid Texas hick, a cowboy who was not very bright, needed Cheney on the ticket in order to give it gravitas.

Now, what is this? Is this not a bunch of journalists, both print and TV, parroting a talking point? I mean, it was uncanny when we put it together 18 years ago. It remains uncanny to people hearing it again and again or for the first time. How does it happen? How do this many different people working at that many different places, how do they all end up using the identical word in their attempts at criticizing George W. Bush?

And then is that parroting dangerous to our democracy? That’s what Jimmy Kimmel says in all of his political enlightenment. And we have many more such montages since that one. We have put together five or six, maybe more than that, that use the same principle, same number of journalists using an identical word or term. And yet here they are bleating and moaning and whining about Sinclair claiming they’re not going to do this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jimmy Kimmel worried about the danger to democracy of people parroting talking points, when that’s all he knows how to do when it comes to issues after being fed lines and data by Chuck Schumer.

By the way, Monmouth University. It is 75%, three out of four Americans said they believe traditional television and print news are in fact reporting fake news. Seventy-five percent. It’s not gonna change anything, but people may be getting wise.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yeah, do we have time here? We do. Grab sound bite number 27. We have another montage. This goes back to November 2015 through October of 2016. And this is so many Washington establishment smart people, Drive-By Media experts, Republican establishment elites, think tank specialists, Never Trumpers, all saying that Trump would never win, all predicting a Hillary landslide.

TIM MILLER: (8/18/16) Trump is gonna get killed in the general election.

ALEX CONANT: (8/18/16) Trump is gonna suffer an embarrassing loss this fall.

RACHEL MADDOW: (7/29/16) Unless this election happens on Mars, Donald Trump will lose.

KARL ROVE: (11/2015) Republicans are not going to win this next election.

MARK CUBAN: (8/1/16) It’s a landslide for Hillary. No question.

EVAN MCMULLIN: (8/14/16) Donald Trump will lose.

JEB BUSH: (12/15/15) You’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency.

RYAN LIZZA: (8/17/16) Trump is on his way to lose in the biggest loss since 1984.

JORGE RAMOS: (9/1/16) His strategy is to win the White House without Latinos. I don’t think he can do it.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: (8/16/16) Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party’s chance.

TED CRUZ: (2/28/16) If we nominate Donald, Hillary beats him.

DAVID AXELROD: (10/23/16) I don’t know any consultant who privately
believes that Donald Trump’s going to win.

DANA PERINO: (8/18/16) Trump would very much be able to get 35-40% of the vote and not win.

MIKE MURPHY: (8/8/16) He’s a demagogue and a neo-racist and I hope he loses. He deserves to lose.

DIANE MACEDO: (8/15/16) A landslide defeat is very possible.

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: (8/15/16) Could be headed for a landslide defeat.

BILL KRISTOL: (9/23/16) Donald Trump will just choke.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: (05/ 2016) I don’t see how he can win.

BARACK OBAMA: (2/16/16) I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be president.

RUSH: So you had a lot of luminaries in there. You had Rachel Maddow, Karl Rove, Alex Conant, Mark Cuban, Jeb Bush, Jorge Ramos, Lindsey Grahamnesty, David Axelrod, Dana Perino, Mike Murphy, Republican consultant extraordinaire. He’s the guy that got three delegates with a hundred million dollars, three delegates for Jeb. Lawrence O’Donnell, Dr. Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and of course Barack Hussein O.

And once again, you have what? You have conventional wisdom, you had rat-a-tat type thinking and utterances. You basically had people who Jimmy Kimmel described as what? Parroting talking points. All saying the same thing. These are the people we’re supposed to listen to. These are the people that haven’t been normal since Trump won. These are the people that have been discombobulated and driven one or two degrees of insane. And they have yet to recover.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I have one more montage that we’ve put together from the Grooveyard of Forgotten Sound Bites. This one takes us back to 1995. Now, the reason we’re doing this is just to, once again, nail the Drive-By Media. Sinclair media, 173 television stations, had their on air news anchors read a statement claiming that Sinclair is not fake news. That it’s straight up and down straight news and that they engage in standard journalism techniques and practices and that they will not engage in one-sided reporting as is happening throughout much of the rest of the news media.

This has angered much of the rest of the news media because this is Sinclair, which is a conservative ownership group, trashing the Drive-By Media and referring to it as fake news. Donald Trump picked up on it, tweeted out how he’s very proud of Sinclair and finds it ironic that the Drive-Bys are upset that Sinclair is making all of their anchors read the same statement. I mean, that’s not journalism. This is a corporation mandating its employees execute policy, and that’s not what journalism is.

And so what we’re trying to illustrate here, that’s what the Drive-Bys do. They are the ones that speak with one language, one tongue, that have one point of view about every story, and no matter where you go, that’s the angle you get. The narrative, the story, doesn’t matter where you see it, it always has only one take, one particular point of view. And we’ve shown that with a bunch of montages from our Grooveyard. Here’s one all the way back, the budget battle of 1995.

Now, this is where the Republicans were lied about in the big budget battle that resulted in a government shutdown over the fact that there were supposedly school lunch cuts in the Republican budget, and so the Democrats began alleging the Republicans wanted to starve kids! Republicans were going to starve kids. Republicans wanted American kids to be hungry. They wanted them to go to school and not be able to eat lunch.

They actually said this. And the media parroted it. And of course it was silly. There wasn’t a cut in the school lunch budget. But the Democrats even had school kids in Louisiana writing letters to Republican members of Congress saying, “Mr. Congressman, I can’t learn if I’m hungry. I want to learn, I want to be educated, but I can’t learn anything if I’m starving,” as though parents would let their kids go hungry if the government didn’t buy ’em lunch, and the whole thing was absurd. And rather than the media point that out, the media joins the chorus about how mean-spirited the Republicans are and how they’re trying to starve the children.

So we put together a montage. This happened on Rush Limbaugh The Television Show. This is 23 years ago. The gravitas montage was from 2000, so that’s 18, 19 years ago. This is 23 years ago. The people on this sound bite are Richard Gephardt, Democrat, Missouri; George Stephanopoulos; Dick Durbin: Ted Kennedy, Patsy Schroeder, congresswoman from Colorado; Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, representative Jose Serrano, Democrat, New York; Paul Wellstone, Jerry Nadler of New York, Pat Schroeder again, Albert Nguyen, Luis Gutierrez, and representative John Lewis of Georgia. And here it is.

THOMAS BARRETT: Why do the Republicans want to take apples and milk away from six year olds?

LYNN WOOLSEY: Starving children is not the solution.

RICHARD GEPHARDT: The Republicans are taking food out of the mouths of millions of needy children.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It’s cruel to kids.

DICK DURBIN: Stop declaring war on our kids.

TED KENNEDY: War on their children. War on their children.

PAT SCHROEDER: I also would like to speak to a moment about the mean-spiritedness I’m hearing about on the floor today.

PAUL VOLCKER: But how can they be so mean-spirited?

RICHARD GEPHARDT: These cuts are mean-spirited.

JOSE SERRANO: The mean-spirited Republicans.

PAUL WELLSTONE: It is mean-spirited. It is vicious.

JERRY NADLER: These draconian, mean-spirited and immoral cuts in funding.

PAT SCHROEDER: We’re seeing draconian cuts.

ALBERT WYNN: Once again, they’re playing Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to give to the rich.

LUIS GUTIERREZ: We’re gonna let the kids go hungry again.

JOHN LEWIS: They’re coming for our children. They’re coming for the poor. They’re coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled.

RUSH: There you have it, John Lewis, who was beat upside the head at Selma with our giant finale there. Now, this is one of those things that I have to tell you, we put this together in 1995, and even when it was happening, I’m saying, “There’s no way anybody’s gonna believe this. This is just so far beyond the pale that nobody’s gonna believe this. That everybody is gonna join me in laughing themselves silly at this.”

And yet there were plenty of Democrat voters who bought into it hook, line, and sinker, believed every bit of it, or at least voted as if they did and acted as if they did. And of course the media was right in giving all of these people as much time as they wanted. Now, you talk about sounding like a bunch of parrots and something ridiculous? And this is why Republicans to this day are scared to death of government shutdowns because this kind of crap beat them. I’m sure they were sitting there saying, “Nobody’s gonna believe we want to starve kids!”

So you think the partisanship of today has reached a new low and the Democrats of today are as mean-spirited and outrageous as ever. That may be, but 1995, 23 years ago, they were just as vicious, and they were just as big a bunch of liars. And they used the same kind of defamatory allegations. And, of course, what do you say to, “You’re trying to starve our kids.” What do you say? “No, we’re not trying to starve your kids.”

The minute you accept the premise here you’re almost dead. “No, I don’t want to starve your children. No, there aren’t any cuts in the school lunch program.” It furthered the idea, it furthered the belief that the Republicans are anti-children, anti-government assistance or what have you. But the immediate point is, you talk about parroting, talk about sounding identical and the same. Remember, there were no media people in this sound bite, but they’re the ones that gave them the voice. They’re the ones that helped them make the point.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back to the montage, 1995 school lunch program. You heard it. Republicans want to starve kids. Republicans are mean-spirited and extremist. They’re coming for our children. War on our children, war on our children.

The Republicans, as I said, never pushed back on it. They never reacted to it. Now, in part, that was because nobody thought anybody would believe that. The standard mode back then was, “Nobody’s gonna believe this. We want to starve kids?” Well, enough people did. And not that Republicans want to starve kids, but because the ground had been laid that the Republicans are mean-spirited and don’t care about people, whereas Democrats do.

Now, my point is Republicans, didn’t respond to that, and they didn’t respond to anything that happened after that. They never responded to any of this crap, including George W. Bush and Karl Rove never responded to any of the defamatory allegations made about them for eight years. And Republican voters were fit to be tied because they were being tarred and feathered too.

One person has come along since 1995 and pushed back against it. It happens to be Trump, and he got elected. Because he pushes back against it, he refuses to accept these people’s premises, and he throws it right back down their throats. And that is one of the many reasons why Trump remains popular and one of the reasons he was elected and it still remains a good lesson.