http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Rush-Limbaugh-show-advertising-blackmail/2014/09/24/id/596705/?promo_code=12BDF-1Wednesday, 24 Sep 2014 05:04 PM
By Cathy Burke
"The Rush Limbaugh Show" on Wednesday accused a "small number of hardcore political activists" of being behind a two-year-old Stop Rush protest that amounts to "blackmail" of small business people who advertise with the high-profile conservative talk-show host.
"A small number of politically motivated out-of-state activists are distributing target lists indiscriminately, and annoying small businesses until they give up the advertising deals that help them grow, or risk being unable to conduct business at all," show spokesman Brian Glicklich said in a post on the show's website.
"It's not even activism … it's blackmail," he said.
The Limbaugh show's website called the number of people behind the protest "remarkably tiny," alleging just 10 Twitter users account for almost 70 percent of all StopRush tweets to advertisers, "amplified by illicit software."
"[T]hese activists are not and never would have been customers … their only role is to harass small businesses in an attempt to interfere with their operations, as long as they are advertising with Rush," the website story charged.
According to "The Rush Limbaugh Show," the anti-Limbaugh move uses automated tweeting software that lets users blast out tweets faster than someone writing their own posts.
The show charges the use of such equipment violates Twitter rules.
"They send barrages of thousands of messages through this software until advertisers are bullied and harassed into cancellation," the show said.
The list of people the show accused of being behind the movement includes a professor at Kent State University, who allegedly uses her official email account to hound advertisers, the show said.
But the man behind the movement, it maintains, is Media Matters for America executive vice president Angelo Carusone, who was interviewed in the Village Voice about the protest that initially targeted conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck, and then took on Limbaugh two years ago.
"I believe persistence pays off," Carusone told the Voice about his Stop Beck effort. "… it was effective every day, because we attached real financial consequences to what he was doing."
