RUSH: Here’s Michael in Salisbury, Maryland, well known to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Well, hello, Rush. Greetings from the eastern shore of Maryland.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: I appreciate you having me. I have a question for you, and I was told this is a great Open Line Friday question.
RUSH: We’ll see.
CALLER: Back in the days when you started out, I remember reading your first book, and you said you read several newspapers a day. Well, nowadays we have the Internet. What are the blog sites that you prefer to read? I know you talk about American Thinker a lot, and one reason I’m asking about this is I do one myself, and I want to know what I should pattern my blog site on.
RUSH: I’m going to take you through a little history because this actually turns out to be a pretty good question.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: When I started, the first iteration of this program was in Sacramento in 1984.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And back then, it was just newspapers, and I would prep three hours in Sacramento with three papers. Well, maybe four, if you throw in USA Today. The two local Sacramento papers at the time, the San Francisco Chronicle, sometimes the Wall Street Journal. Maybe it was four or five. By the way, I got my first computer, Apple 2c, and that’s where I fist started logging on to CompuServe and the various news sources there. So the universe began to expand.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And I was on the cutting edge of this —
CALLER: Of course.
RUSH: — of utilizing the Internet. But it was back 256 baud, these slow, slow things. It was magically fast back then, but it was snail’s pace by today’s standards. Then I moved to New York and, of course, that all changed with all the papers there, the Washington Post, and the Internet was expanding in terms of services available. It quickly became clear that after about 1990, I couldn’t do it all on my own, even doing it 24/7. There was just too much available, too much to find. So people who were with me then, who are still with me now, I said, ‘Look, I want you to go here and find; I want you to go there and find,’ and they know what I’m looking for.
CALLER: You outsourced your media research.
RUSH: I outsourced it to staff, not to India.
CALLER: That’s good.
RUSH: Okay? I outsourced it to staff who know me, so they don’t send me stuff that’s worthless. They know I’m going to be interested in it or not, and what happens is, starting this afternoon and through the weekend and up ’til Monday morning, my printers at home and here will be going nuts, stuff I’m finding and printing, and after I print it, I forget it, I don’t look at it. Let’s pretend tomorrow is a workday.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’ll leave here, I’ll get home, the printer here will go nuts and at home it will go nuts. People are looking for things around the clock. I stagger it, not overnight, but I have three people that work diligently on this and every morning I get in here at seven, eight o’clock, and start doing the intense prep of the latest news for that particular day, coupled with what all has been found and printed for me by myself and these other three people over the course of the night, and it just keeps building, and building, and building. About 11 o’clock I stop, I take that huge stack out of the printer, and that’s when I start going through and putting together what I’m going to do. Now, I’m the one that looks at the blogs. Some of the others, you know, will step into them with a link or something like that. But if I start naming the blogs, I’d be glad to, but I’m going to leave some out, and I will end up being offensive. I’ll hurt some people’s feelings.
CALLER: It’s sort of like when you talk about cigars, you don’t want to leave anybody out. I can see that.
RUSH: Yes. There’s some really bright people out there in these blogs. There’s some really brilliant people who find the same stories I do, everybody does now. That’s not the big deal. But some of these people have some really unique insights into them. Sometimes they find stuff that I haven’t found or that the staff hasn’t found.
CALLER: They play the angles, when I do my website, I do the same thing. So I could see that.
RUSH: What do you mean, play the angles?
CALLER: They play different angles, as in, they look at different pieces of a story, something that —
RUSH: Well, yeah —
CALLER: — the obvious part is obvious but then there’s something that, hey, you know, this reminds me of something else that I saw —
RUSH: True. But even looking at the obvious, sometimes I disagree with them. But that spawns additional thoughts that I have.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: I mean, these are all conservative bloggers. Other than for entertainment, I do not waste my time with liberal blogs. I don’t believe them. Why would you want to surround yourself with insane people? Even if they are on your computer. Why would you want to do this? I don’t. I know what they’re going to say about things. That’s what the staff is for. I tell the staff, you hang around and you look at the insane websites out there. They get duty pay for this, hazard duty. But, on the conservative side, there’s never unanimity of thought, and I disagree with them sometimes, and that helps me even further cement an argument that I want to make, but, there’s so much out there now, if I weren’t disciplined, if our staff here weren’t disciplined, we could go into overload every day.
CALLER: Oh, I believe it.
RUSH: As it is, I’ve got three stacks here today, and this is Open Line Friday, it’s a little different, but I’ll get 30% of it done, maybe 40%. The stuff I don’t use I’ll put aside for tomorrow in case tomorrow is light. But tomorrow is never light.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Every day we’re overloaded.
CALLER: Too much information, but in a good way.
RUSH: Well, there’s always going to be too much information. The key is being able to synthesize it, break it down to its essence; take the complex, make it understandable. For example, here’s another trick. If I got a story from a newspaper, any website that prints out in three pages, I only print the first page because the other two pages are a bunch of BS that comes from the Nexis database that have nothing to do with the story. I don’t need any more pieces of paper on my desk than I have here. I only print one page of it. And I’m very lucky. Only one of these three people keeps track of what stuff they send me that I use and give me grief if I’m not using enough of it. The others are pretty good at keeping their ego out of it. But this one guy keeps a record. If I don’t use this he’ll send it back two or three times, ‘I think the time’s right for this now,’ he’ll say. ‘Look, it didn’t work the first time, get the message.’ But it takes a large effort. This show is huge, we have a massive responsibility to the audience, to meet and surpass audience expectations, and it’s just not possible for me to do it all every day. And the blogs have become a big part of it. But I don’t know what you’re talking about with your blog. I assume you’re a conservative?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Yeah. Is your blog up and running?
CALLER: It better be.
RUSH: What’s the name of your blog?
CALLER: It’s monoblogue. It’s www.monoblogue.us, and you will fry my server if you wish.
RUSH: Well, it probably will happen.
CALLER: I’ll be curious to see that. It’s monologue with a B, and you’re the inspiration —
RUSH: Oh, I see.
CALLER: — because you have a monologue every hour, and I just threw a B in the middle of it.
RUSH: I do monologues constantly. I’ll do a monologue after a phone call. I am a monologuist.
CALLER: You were the inspiration for the name, and I just put a B in the middle of it.
RUSH: Well, if I inspired the name of your blog, you deserve a little hit here. So it’s www.monoblogue.com?
CALLER: Dot US. I’m an American. It’s dot US.
RUSH: Okay. Monoblogue dot what?
CALLER: US.
RUSH: Not com, just US?
CALLER: You got it.
RUSH: monoblogue.us?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Okay. You, if not this instant, in mere moments are officially fried, on your server. Thanks for the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more thing about this show prep here and how it happens. I never became an employer until I started this show. I was always an employee. As an employee, we all, whenever we do great work, we all want it to be acknowledged and we want to be accredited and we want it to be noticed by higher-ups and so forth, and we all think that doesn’t happen enough. So you always try to take the lessons you learned as an employee, if you ever become an employer, and employ those lessons, as well as the people, in order to maintain motivation, inspiration, and this sort of thing. And I do this. But sometimes it gets funny and a little challenging. And this is where I have to stand back as the employer, as the big guy, and just sort of let it bounce off and resist the temptation to respond as I would like to. Sometimes one of these three researchers, going on vacation, will make a big deal, ‘Are you sure that you can do this without me?’ The temptation is to say, ‘Are you kidding? I did this long before you.’ But I say, ‘We’ll handle it, your vacation’s up, it’s due, go have a good time and don’t worry about anything.’ But yet it doesn’t matter, even while on vacation, they send stuff in. Because everybody loves the program that works on it, everybody is just devoted to it. That’s largely because of me, as boss. Everybody wants to be part of a winner. It’s fun being part of a winner, especially in the past nine days. We’ve just been having the time of our lives here.
Dawn got a little angry at me today for granting an interview to the Palm Beach Post. She thought I’d lost my mind, because they had a history of being pretty tough on me and, in her mind, unfair. So it’s interesting, I make a decision to do this — and I didn’t tell them about it until today, did the interview two days ago — and even though Dawn has been here six years, since right at the time I started losing my hearing, she knows me, but all of a sudden, one day, I can lose my mind in her mind. She thinks I’ve gone nuts. It’s cute. (laughing) And it’s all based on the fact they care so much, they don’t want me messing up. It’s not a personal criticism. I didn’t take it as a personal criticism. Well, maybe for the first five minutes. Then after that, as boss, I realized what was actually behind it was a deep affection and hoping, ‘Oh, gosh, I hope this doesn’t backfire, does he know what he’s doing?’ And, if truth be told, Snerdley was still fuming about it even after he read the interview. Not because of the interview, he thought I’d taken a great unnecessary career risk. Once I explained the strategery, things they hadn’t even considered because they didn’t know, made all kinds of sense and now they’re back in the fold, they’re back on my side. Did you hear that? Somebody is printing me something now, even. Show prep coming in even while the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears. I’m not going to go look at it right now. I will during the next break.