The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on February 23, 2021, 01:40:08 am
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Limbaugh's Success Came in Spite of Big Media
https://www.creators.com/read/debra-saunders/02/21/limbaughs-success-came-in-spite-of-big-media (https://www.creators.com/read/debra-saunders/02/21/limbaughs-success-came-in-spite-of-big-media)
WASHINGTON — I met Rush Limbaugh before he became a god.
It was the mid-1980s. Our careers had begun but had not taken off. Rush had a radio talk show on Sacramento station KFBK-AM 1530. I worked in the California legislature.
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More than once, Rush told me that his show would never fall out of favor, as so many other shows did, and that he expected to broadcast until the end. Turns out, he was right.
You can't defy gravity, I responded at the time, TV and radio shows rise and fall. Rush believed that he would be different. And he was.
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We remained friends over the years. After his syndication, we'd get together for an adult beverage or a meal if we happened to be in the same town. Later we'd communicate over the phone or by email.
We disagreed on a number of issues and his language choices, but this is not the time to rake up dead leaves.
Now it's hard to imagine politics before Limbaugh.
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Few realized that Rush was able to amass that kind of power precisely because he offered something big media could not provide — balance. No, not in his show, which was unapologetically conservative, but by presenting arguments that were not treated as credible by the media establishment.
... If big media had been more balanced, Rush Limbaugh would not have become a GOP deity.
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Rush didn't bristle at disagreement. I took him to task more than once and found that he enjoyed the give-and-take. Of course he did, he was at the center of the action.
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If one wants to get a clear image of what it was like at the beginning, I recommend reading The Way Things Ought to Be by Rush. He goes into what it was like trying to launch the EIB network.