RUSH: MSNBC has just had its lowest ratings ever, a maximum of 55,000 people. Do you realize there are more people going to the bathroom at one time in this country than are watching MSNBC? And, by the way, this all happens to coincide with my ban on playing any sound bites from that network. I played a role in this, folks.
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RUSH: Well, it’s even worse than I thought. (sigh) I just learned that we’re not even getting the full version of the truth in the middle of the Brian’s explanations or apologies. I just learned that his helicopter landed a full hour after the one that was shot down. The helicopter that was shot down that Brian was not on, did not land at the same time as the one he was on and following. His chopper wasn’t even fired on. It showed up an hour after the chopper that was fired on went down.
You know, folks, I’m sitting here remembering. Brian Williams used to call this program, before he became the nightly news anchor. MSNBC used to be entirely different than it is today. It used to be a news network that actually was trying to be a mainstream (that would have been still liberal), but news network. In fact when it first went on air as MSNBC, the MS was for Microsoft. It still is. Is original partner. If you remember way back in those days…
It wasn’t that long, in the nineties, they had a number of tech-oriented half hours and full hours and guests and hosts, and they made a big deal of incorporating computers and the Web, the Internet, with their presentation of the news. You know, Ann Coulter was a star on MSNBC back in the day, and Laura Ingraham was a star back in the day on MSNBC, and back in those days, Chris Matthews was an entirely different person than he is today. He was a straight-down-the-middle guy.
He was Democrat, but he was a down-the-middle analyst. He had his activism, I’m not falsely remembering this, but I’m telling you: It’s dramatically different now, and not just as MSNBC, but it’s dramatically different at all of these networks. It has gotten worse. The polarization in what is called the news has gotten worse, and the people that are quote “journalists” (self-described and in the news) are now clearly not at all doing news, and they clearly are not at all doing journalism.
They’re leaving no doubts that they are not journalists. They are fully invested activists, and they’re not even pretending to be journalists — which is okay. You can do what you want to do. The problem is, they still publicly claim that they’re journalists. They do not own up to what they’ve become. They do what they do now under the guise of journalism, and they clearly aren’t! They’ve abandoned that a long time ago.
Now, back in the day I’m talking about, Brian Williams anchored the nine p.m. newscast at MSNBC. And it was a legitimate full-hour newscast, and remember Olbermann had a show? But even Olbermann’s show was, as best it could be, reasonable. This is during the Lewinsky era, by the way, that I’m referring to, the mid-nineties and afterwards, and I’m sure those of you who used to watch it if you put on your memory caps you’ll remember all this.
And it is so different now.
It has taken such a plunge into the darkness of full unabridged, undiluted, just full-fledged poisonous practically Marxism. I’m trying to sit hear and remember when… Well, I remember when it happened, but what was the catalyst for it? Now, clearly the arrival of Fox News — and to these people, the overnight success of Fox News and what and what their perception of Fox News was and still is. Their perception of Fox News… Remember when Air America started.
They bombed royally. Air America never amounted to a hill of beans because they looked at it the way they looked at conservative talk radio. They didn’t see a commercial enterprise here. They saw a political organization that they thought was being funded by powerbrokers, and so they set out to duplicate… Well, not even that. They didn’t know how to engage in a commercial enterprise. The people that did Air America hadn’t the slightest idea about radio.
They didn’t know the first thing about broadcasting, didn’t understand what it was that made it work, couldn’t be made to understand connecting with an audience if they had to. Didn’t understand the whole concept of selling advertisement! None of it. They just thought you put liberalism on the air and the donors would show up and the funders or the underwriters and they’d be off to the races. It never happened.
By the same token, the MSNBC people looking at Fox, think a rabid right-wing news network has shot up. And they’re scared of it, and they’re offended by it, and they’re angered by it. So their desire or their thought to counter it is to go full-tilt left wing, because they believe there are far many more liberals in America (and “progressives”) than there are conservatives, and they still believe it.
Of course if you want to look at relative audiences for things, you can disapprove many of these silly ideas that the left has about the composition of the body politic in this country. But I just — I’m struck by what MSNBC used to be. Brian Williams was one of the — I guess he still is — one of the just most personally naturally funny people. He and Kit Carson got along like you would not believe. Kit would go with me sometimes when I used to appear sometimes on MSNBC.
Chris Matthews, at one time, guest hosted this program! I mean, just to show you, just to illustrate. I know that was eons ago. But in the midst of all that, we haven’t changed here. We’ve modernized with the times. But who I am is who I am. I have not changed who I am. I’ve not gone over to any dark side or bright side. I’m a solid guy. My core beliefs are my core beliefs, and they haven’t changed; the way I present them hasn’t changed. You modernize in other ways, change with the times in other ways.
But these people changed who they were!
They tried to change their very identity, and they poison themselves. Now you’ve got stories like this sad thing with Brian Williams, totally making this stuff up, and Dan Rather the same thing. I tell you, I think that they were never challenged. They had this monopoly: ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the newspapers, all the magazines, the publishing houses. They had a veritable media monopoly, and this program started, 1988, and it spawned a whole lot of others and then Fox News and conservative blogs and the websites and so forth.
I don’t think they even now know how to deal with it.
They have been so continually bamboozled by the destruction of their monopoly. They never have understood the whole idea of competition. They never had to compete, and they really didn’t compete with each other. ABCCBSNBC looked at the themselves as one entity. I mean, they all wanted to be number one for what it might matter to their salary, but it wasn’t what made them live or die. It wasn’t what motivated them to go to work every day. The news was a fraternity to them.
Whatever network they were on, they were in a fraternity, and the networks were just different frat houses. They were all, though, on the same page and they all had the same objectives. They all looked the same way, they talked the same way, they sounded the same, they thought the same thing, they believed the same thing. And then for the first time in many of their professional lives, they’re faced with the destruction of their monopoly and then competition.
I think it has caused a descent into darkness the likes of which they don’t know and don’t even comprehend themselves. That’s what leads Dan Rather to start just making up the news. You know, before there was conservative media, if Dan Rather wanted to destroy a Republican president, he had no opposition. He could go after Richard Nixon all he wanted. Well, he tried to do the same thing with George H. W. Bush and then George W. Bush, and he ran into opposition with George W. Bush.
He ran into people, for the first time in his life, scrutinizing his work and not letting him get away with it. He didn’t know how to deal with it. So he has it in his head that Bush is a fraud. He just personally believes it. He’s got no evidence. So? All right, if you have this truth, “Bush is a fraud,” and you don’t have any proof — you don’t have any evidence, but you have this belief; you just know it — okay, then morally you are perfectly fine in making up a story. This is how they think.
“If you have to make up a story to prove that what you already know is true, then making it up is fine.” That’s the moral equivalence. If you know Bush is a reprobate — and nobody else does, but you know it — you just know it, but you can’t find any evidence? So make it up! You do what you have to do. I think they were driven to all this by the specter of competition, the likes of which they’d never faced.
When you’ve had a greased skid, when you’ve had a free rein, when you’ve had an open road to get wherever you want to go, and all of the there are obstacles, and you’ve never had to face them before? It can play with your ethics, and it clearly has here. And what has happened to what used to be called mainstream journalism, it’s stunning! What’s happened to MSNBC is a great microcosm, and what Rather did making up the stuff on Bush and the National Guard is another microcosm.
It’s breathtaking to watch. They’re in full-fledged panic, and I think they’ve been in full-fledged panic for I don’t know how long. I think it’s the only thing that explains the irrational behavior that they find themselves in, or that we are witnessing them in. With a couple other things, it explains their total unquestioning idolatrous support of Obama. I think it explains the fact they think we are a bigger enemy than any foreign threat. No question that they believe that.
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RUSH: You know, you look at MSNBC. They are barely breathing. They barely have an audience. They barely have enough to rate an asterisk. It’s embarrassing to have 55,000 people peak, on something that bills itself as a national news network. What did they do? They threw out anything that could be considered mainstream, and they just went pedal-to-the-metal, “progressive,” left-wing extreme. They had the proper “diversity.”
They had quasi-conservative male host with a liberal female cohost on the morning show. Then they have the requisite number of African-Americans, the requisite number of European accented Americans, they have a number of lesbians, they have Hispanics. They had this whole diversity thing, this silly diversity thing — as though everything depends on what you look like — and they forgot all about content. The reason they forgot about content is because they were arrogant and assumed that everybody is as insane as they are.
I think… You know, I often sit here and say that the Democrat Party base has been driven insane with rage and hatred by the daily utterances of Democrats. I mean, the Democrat Party today is filled with hatred, filled with rage against all of their enemies, opponents, people they don’t like, and they have driven their base livid with rage. I think they have succumbed to it, in a sense. They’re always angry. They’re constantly angry, filled with rage and hatred. They don’t just disagree with us.
They have a visceral hatred, and it shows up on the air. Nobody wants to watch that, and they think that’s who their audience is. They have no idea about content, content, content. They think they can steal the day by being “properly diversified.” It’s just the silly crap that they believe on display. They are a walking failure. They are a demonstration of the abject failure of liberalism, MSNBC. By the way, I deserve some kudos for this.
Because they had a much higher audience when I was playing sound bites from that insane asylum every day on this program, and I decided to ban ’em. I said, “Why in the world should people who think and talk this way be given any added publicity? Why elevate what’s happening on that stupid network?” So I banned ’em, and the ratings plunge at MSNBC coincides with their official ban here on the EIB Network.