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RUSH: CNN. I think we need, perhaps, ladies and gentlemen, to put a suicide watch on the whole network. Because the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, called a press conference at ten o’clock this morning Eastern time to announce that (because of never-before- used investigative techniques) they have been able to confirm that Malaysian Flight 370 did indeed end up in a place it had no place being.

Nobody has any idea how it got there, but it is that area in the Indian Ocean four hours southeast of Perth, Australia. They say it’s the airplane because they found round objects floating on the ocean surface, and you wouldn’t have anything on a sizable boat that would be round. The hull wouldn’t be round. But an airplane fuselage or engine cowling would all be oval-shaped or round, so they are assuming that it is the airplane.

Now, CNN is just… I predicted last week and the week before that when this day came, CNN would not accept it and would by no means stop. In fact, they have pulled in their prime time superstars to be anchoring their coverage during the… Well, I guess the prime time superstars I guess now went to lunch because the regularly scheduled people are on there now. Before we get into all that, I want to take you back to March 14th, ten days ago. I made a joke, and, as so often is the case, when I made a joke about liberals, damned if it doesn’t come true.

Here is me from March 14th on this program…

RUSH ARCHIVE: The one thing about this missing Malaysian jet, and we will learn at some point, is that global warming played a role. Well, you sit in there, you pooh-pooh it, and you laugh at it, but when this is all said and done, when whatever it is is known, climate change, global warming will no doubt be inserted as a factor, even if that means that it caused the plane to slip into the space-time continuum.

RUSH: So I’m holding here, folks, in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a story from Mother Jones that ran three days ago. That makes it Saturday or late Friday, before the Malaysian prime minister announced that it was over. By the way, does anybody know if they really found anything yet that indicates it’s the plane? He just said it’s over. So this was three days before that.

Mother Jones is an accredited, fully appreciated, ranking, cool and hip leftist publication. “One Reason It May Be Harder to Find Flight 370: We Messed Up the Currents — How climate change factors into the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.” That’s why we haven’t been able to find it! Because our global warming, the climate change we’ve caused has so screwed up the ocean currents that we don’t know where to look.

Now, they haven’t claimed that global warming caused the crash yet, but they are now asserting that global warming factors in. And note that they inject it into everything now as an explanation for everything that people can’t understand. They just throw that in there. So it was 10 days ago I joked that global warming would be blamed for the missing flight, and we’re getting there. This article claims that global warming is making it harder to find the wreckage because the currents have changed.

“Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, setting a complex stage for the ongoing search for MH370. If the Boeing 777 did plunge into the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, the location where its debris finally ends up, if found at all, may be vastly different from where investigators could have anticipated 30 years ago.”

It’s so bad that 30 years ago we’d have found this plane within days. But since it’s not 30 years ago, it’s 30 years hence — and there’s been so much climate change and so much global warming, and so much man-made distortion of nature — that where we think the plane should be is nowhere near where it’s going to be. Because we have screwed up the planet. (interruption) Wait a minute. (interruption)Wait, wait, wait. (interruption) Don’t even….

Snerdley is now arguing with me on the logical reaction to, “Well, if we know currents now, then why didn’t we know it’d changed?” Don’t even go there! That’s the sucker’s bet is to get into a debate with them about currents. Look, have you ever heard of the Gulf Stream? The Gulf Stream is basically what keeps the UK habitable. The UK benefits from it. The Gulf Stream goes from Gulf of Mexico down to southern tip of Florida, and it carries warm water north toward the British Isles.

That warm water does affect their climate, and there’s no way we can change it. If we’re gonna destroy currents, the Gulf Stream should be nonexistent. But it’s still there. You can see it, in fact. If you go out on a boat you can actually see the Gulf Stream on the surface of the ocean, it is that powerful a current. In fact, what it does, folks — what the Gulf Stream does — is it’s actually a conveyor belt and on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean you see the Gulf Stream and it’s traveling in a direction from the southwest to the northeast.

But underneath it looks back down and brings the colder water up there south, and there’s just a loop. And there was a story about, I don’t know, a year, two, three years ago, that we had destroyed the conveyor belt because of global warming; that there wasn’t anything coming south. It turned out to be totally bogus. It was a bogus report. But this is nothing more than activism disguised as cool, hip journalism. I’ll tell you, we sit here and we talk about the low-information voter.

But I’m gonna tell you: We got a bigger problem than that, and it is illustrated in the situation with Matt Drudge and his Obamacare penalty tax payment. We’re dealing with genuine stupidity, ignorance, and lack of education at the highest levels of what is called “media.” There is I think a natural assumption that people make that the media is made up of informed people, that they may be biased but at least they’re smart.

I think we’re going to have to change our perception. They’re not smart. Their lack of curiosity and their left-wing bigotry and closed-mindedness has effectively shut them off from learning anything that is outside their comfort level. There are just some basic things, like economics. They don’t get it. They don’t get the minimum wage destroys jobs; it does. They just don’t get it. They don’t get how tax cuts increase revenue to government treasuries.

They don’t get how tax cuts can increase employment. They don’t get it. To them, that is a political and partisan argument, and it’s not. It’s economic fact. But if there is anything that they think — any fact, any unassailable factual piece of information that they think — is tied to conservatism, then it’s automatically incorrect. It’s not qualified, and is thus disqualified. As such, these people have shut themselves off from a tremendous amount of actual, charted knowledge in the human experience.

And it’s resulted in a profession that’s populated now by truly arrogant, condescending people who believe they know everything. And it is shocking how truly, I think, ignorant — and in some cases maybe even stupid — that there. This Mother Jones story is classic. I mean, this is considered a very, very hip. “Mother Jones? Oh, yeah, man, it’s cool!” And I’m sure these people really believe this.

This is the degree to which they have been brainwashed combined with the religious fervor that they believe in their politics. They really believe that man-made global warming has so destroyed natural ocean currents that it would lead to the fuselage and the wreckage not being found. How else do you get a question from a CNN anchor, “Could it be, Mary Schiavo, that a black hole swallowed up the airplane?” Now, that is so…

In fact, do you know what CNN’s done? We have sound bites coming up. CNN went out and found a supposedly objective media analyst to ask him about their coverage. So CNN covered themselves covering the missing airline. You gotta hear this. So let me take a break and we’ll come back. We’ve got the prime minister of Malaysia. Is it the prime minister or the president? (interruption) It is the prime minister? Okay. I wanna get things right. We’ll have him announcing whatever and then CNN investigating and analyzing itself.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go to the audio sound bites and it is Malaysian prime minister. His name is Najib Razak. We have two sound bites.


RAZAK: Its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth. This is a remote location far from any possible landing sites. It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that according to this new data, Flight MH-370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.

RUSH: Now, I want to go back and remind you of a point that I made. You might call it a prediction. When all of these outrageous predictions and guesses were made about what happened to the airplane, I made a point, and this sound bite was all over television as learned analysts sought to analyze what I had analyzed. I said, “The problem with all this wild, meaningless, over the top speculation is that whenever this airplane is found, a simple explanation is going to be given and nobody’s gonna believe it.”

Because there was so much time, so much over-the-top media coverage, various conspiracies, conspiracy theories, you name it. So now we have the prime minister Najib Razak saying (summarized), “It’s over. That’s where it is. It ended right there the Indian Ocean west of Perth.” Do you think CNN’s gonna accept this? Ha! CNN no way is gonna accept this. They are going to spend another week at least on this, with experts disagreeing now with the prime minister, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Remember, Malaysia has been beat up throughout this as incompetent, backwards, uncivilized, and incapable of running an airline and keeping any kind of accurate records. I mean, everybody’s been dumping on Malaysia in this whole investigation. This guy comes out, and is the source authority on what happened. I’m just warning you that the vast majority of media people who’ve got a lot of ratings and money invested in this are not going to let this be the final word of the story.

Now in the next sound bite Prime Minister Najib Razak asks the media to give the families privacy.

RAZAK: Malaysia Airlines have already spoken to the families of the passengers and crew to inform them of this development. For them, the past few weeks have been heartbreaking; I know this news must be harder still. I urge the media to respect their privacy, and allow them the space they need at this very difficult time.

RUSH: Yeah, good luck with that. So let me give you an example of what I think is an increasing body of evidence to substantiate a claim that there is rampant un-education, stupidity, and ignorance at the highest levels of the Drive-By Media. One of the reports about the downed airliner or the crashed airliner today — and it’s a news flash. It’s one of these “breaking news” things. It has all kinds of bells and whistles attached to it.

It’s that the copilot, the copilot was making his first ever real flight in a 777 on this flight. Of course, the fact of the matter is that that’s probably true for every pilot in one of these things. They all learn and are type-rated in simulators. It’s simply too expensive to take everybody that flies a 777 to give them actual flight training in the air in one of these airplanes. It’s cost prohibitive. They just couldn’t do it.

They’re not gonna take one of these airplanes up with nobody in it going nowhere, not delivering any cargo, just to give flight time to a crew member. How many times on this program have we told you, “The odds are that you get on an airline and either the copilot or pilot are literally flying it for the first time is not uncommon.” That’s how good the simulators are.

Now, why don’t they know this? Why is this such a big deal? It’s a big deal ’cause it’s sensationalism! “It’s a big deal because it maybe leads us to the fact that these idiot Malaysians put somebody not even qualified in that cockpit,” and that’s not how it works. Because you listen to this program, you know more than the vast majority of people in the so-called Big Media.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here, now, the audio sound bite. I promised it so I’m gonna do it. We got two more to go and then we’ll get to the phone. First, this Drudge business. And also, ladies and gentlemen, I, your beloved host, am a finalist for an award as a children’s book author. The voting for that begins tomorrow, and I will provide you details here sometime during the program today.

CNN has decided because everybody’s dumping on ’em — and I’ll tell you something. This is how out of proportion CNN has become. Look, it’s understandable in one sense. They have been in the basement ratings-wise for years. Hell, they have been lower than the basement. They have been in the gutter. Nothing they’ve done has changed their fortunes. Piers Morgan didn’t the work. Anderson Cooper 20 hours a day didn’t work.

The new Crossfire, it hasn’t worked. Nothing has worked. Nothing has made people want to watch CNN. Then this plane went down, and people started watching CNN, and CNN decided, “Okay, that’s the only thing we’re gonna do,” and that’s all they’ve done. They occasionally break away for the first 10 seconds or 20 seconds of an Obama press conference, but then it’s right back to the jet.

So far the only thing that’s taken them away has been something to do with Obama. I think there was one instance where they thought they could make a Republican look really bad and they did that, but for the most part they’ve stuck with it. Now, they have been 24/7 all day on this plane. They have not reported one single word on the Washington mudslide rescue efforts and all those missing people.

We have some missing people because of a mudslide here. CNN hasn’t mentioned it. Not one single other story has been broadcast on CNN in the last four hours. (interruption) Oh, they are? Well, they just broke away, and they’re doing the mudslide now. They’ll be with that for a minute or two and then right back to the jet. “Breaking news: As predicted, 108 accounted for.”

I mean, look at how fast that happened. The minute I mention it, they switch to it. So they went and got a media critic to analyze — basically CNN covering itself covering the plane, and they found a media critic who likes what they’re doing, the guy’s name is Erik Wemple, Washington Post media reporter. Brian Stelter said, “We heard an anchor at Fox say this week that over-coverage of a story like this corrupts the news business.”


WEMPLE: Over-coverage, I think, gets a bad rap. On some of these sites and some of the critics, those over-coverage — as if simply going heavy on a story is a .. a sin in and of itself. We have to stop reflexively criticizing over-coverage or nonstop coverage. I like it. I think when news organizations make strong decisions to go heavy on something and they put resources behind it, oftentimes very good things happen. They break news. I like over-coverage. I like it when news, uh, organizations obsess over something.

RUSH: What could be better than that?

“I like over-coverage.” What is it…? Something I found very interesting here in this bite. “When news organizations make strong decisions to go heavy on something and they put resources behind it, oftentimes very good things happen.” Whaaaat does that mean? Does that mean the media is supposed to make things happen? Yeah! In their minds, they are the news. They are there to impact the outcome of events, not just tell you about them.

So Erik Wemple, who is the media critic for the Washington Post, is on board with this whole notion of over-coverage. He likes it. He likes when news organizations “obsess” over something. So Brian Stelter said, “Okay, well, we’ve seen very clear in the last couple of weeks big differences between cable news channels. We’ve seen CNN go heavy on the plane. We saw Fox belatedly pick up on the story, but avoided it for a while. MSNBC has been also on the story, at least in the ratings. Maybe we’re seeing more clear than ever how different these cable news channels really are.”

WEMPLE: I don’t know is perfectly positioned to do this story. It brands itself as a way up the middle this ideology cable divide. There’s nothing more non-ideological. Two, it’s an international story. CNN is way more suited to carry out this story than it’s other — it — it — deaths overseas. If it does not do this, you know, your leadership should be fired and marched right out of their offices. It has to do this for survival, for its future. There is no other option.

RUSH: “It has to do this for its survival. There is no other option” whatsoever, ’cause they’re the only ones that can do it. “Non-ideological.” Have they covered this on a non-ideological basis? I haven’t watched it. I don’t know how that’s possible. They’re liberals. There has to be a liberal tint in the way they’ve been covering this. I don’t know. I shouldn’t say that. I haven’t watched enough of what CNN’s been doing. I just know that’s what they’ve been doing. So they went out and found a media analyst who loves what they’re doing and praises what they’re doing. I don’t know how long it took ’em to find this guy but he’s probably the only one.

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