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RUSH: To Ellen in Tex’iss somewhere in Tex’iss. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hello. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet. By the way, you’ve got to say, “Tex’iss.” It’s not Texas. Texas is a northern pronunciation. It’s Tex’iss. Right?

CALLER: Well, I have a child in the Principles of American Journalism class at the University of Missouri right now.

RUSH: Oh, no.

CALLER: Oh, yes. So I contacted her yesterday and asked if they had spoken about it yesterday, and there was no mention made at all. But they have been talking about whether or not Twitter is journalism.

RUSH: (laughing) Really?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Now, it’s only been around a year. Give them time to get to it —

CALLER: (groans)

RUSH: — and it only did really reach prominence yesterday. So you need to stay in touch with your daughter, did you say?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Because at some point,I really would be fascinated to know how this comes up, if it does at some point.


CALLER: Well, it’s actually interesting. I floated around on the journalism school websites, because they run a radio station, a television station, and a daily newspaper.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: It’s part of the Missouri Method, which is the most incredible way to learn journalism. But on the television website, for the television station, they have a section which gives justifications for the newsworthiness of the stories that they have run. So it may already be taking place, informally, in some of these newsrooms.

RUSH: Well, it is, but there’s a big difference. Now, I don’t mean to be splitting hairs here, but if there is a representative of the federal government at the University of Missouri J-School helping to determine these stories, then, yeah. If it’s just a professor judging how the students are reporting news, that’s an entirely different matter. Can you hang on through the break, Ellen?

CALLER: Oh, sure.

RUSH: Yeah? Good. Don’t go away.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to Ellen in Tex’iss. Ellen, thank you for waiting. I appreciate your patience. What year is your daughter at the University of Missouri J-School?

CALLER: I’d rather not say.

RUSH: Okay. Okay. I understand, totally. Your illustration that the TV station, you go to the website and they’re already grading or passing judgment on which stories are reported, that’s all fine and dandy as part of the teaching of, the instruction of journalism. The problem then begins with who is doing the teaching and what is their agenda and what is their purpose?

CALLER: Right. Oh, I completely agree. I also attended the j-school.


RUSH: At Mizzou?

CALLER: I did, yes. I don’t work in journalism now, but we were taught it’s who, where, why and how. But also, that you should move to tell people what it means to them.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: But I’ve always thought that shouldn’t people be able to figure that out on their own for themselves? When I was there, everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein or Nellie Bly.

RUSH: That’s what I was going to ask you. Why does your daughter want to be a journalist?

CALLER: It so happens that her program falls under the school of journalism. She doesn’t want to be a daily journalist at all.

RUSH: Oh. Oh. Okay.

CALLER: But the way the things are divided into schools, her program falls under the j-school.

RUSH: Now, what did…? In your era everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. What did that mean?

CALLER: It meant digging for truth wherever it was. We wanted to be Nellie Bly. We didn’t want to be Walter Duranty —

RUSH: Wait a second.

CALLER: — and if something like this had come down, it would have been declared Stalinist from the get go.

RUSH: Wait, you’re really firing my brain off here. I could ask you a question after practically every word. You and your fellow students did not want to be Walter Duranty? What were you taught about Walter Duranty?

CALLER: That he pretty much white-washed the Soviet era.

RUSH: He was a Pulitzer Prize Winner! He wasn’t treated as a hero?

CALLER: Back then he was, but as more and more things came out, you know, people woke up to the fact that it was (garbled) all the way down.

RUSH: No, in your student days, how was Duranty portrayed to you as when you were a student there?

CALLER: Honestly, I don’t recall him being mentioned at all. But I do want to say that while I was at Mizzou I took a criminology class and we were taught about the true Margaret Sanger.

RUSH: And that is?

CALLER: And that was that she wanted to rid the world of “undesirables” and we were also taught about the forced sterilizations and the experiments on African-Americans, the syphilis testing. We were taught about all of that. No spin. At all.

RUSH: Who were the undesirables in her world?

CALLER: Well, you know, “the lower classes,” “the immigrants.” The African-Americans.

RUSH: It was “the stupids.”

CALLER: The minorities.

RUSH: Well, they did assume that African-Americans were dumb and stupid and the world would be better without dumb and stupid people.

CALLER: And it was also Italians and Irish.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: It was the immigrant groups, and there was a belief in phrenology, the bumps on the head. The size of your skull could tell you if you were a criminal or not. It was just insanely unscientific back then.

RUSH: Yeah, but she wasn’t alone, by the way. She had some of the so-called brightest thinkers alive who were supporters of hers. They were fellow travelers in this whole eugenics movement. I want to go back to Woodward and Bernstein — and, by the way, I’m not setting you up for anything with these questions.

CALLER: I don’t think you are.

RUSH: Okay. Because when I asked you, “What did it mean to a journalism student to say, ‘I want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein?'” you said, “To get to the truth.” That’s not what I think it was. I think Woodward and Bernstein brought down a Republican president. Let’s just leave it at “president.” Woodward and Bernstein brought down a president. Journalism can destroy people, and it wasn’t just Woodward and Bernstein.


Others that went to j-school back in that era, and still to this day, want to be on 60 Minutes. You can walk down the hall at your average j-school, it doesn’t matter where it is, and ask the students, “Why are you here?” And they’ll tell you, “I want to change the world! I want to make the world a safer place. I want to make a difference.” And, of course, the answer is, “Well, then, you’re in the wrong place.” “What do you mean I’m in the wrong place?

“Journalism isn’t about world peace. Journalism isn’t about making the world a better place.” “Well, yes, it is!” “No, journalism isn’t about social justice. Journalism is about telling somebody who wasn’t there, where you were, what happened. That’s all it is.” But that isn’t journalism today. The agenda of journalism today is all about the narrative and who sets it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. The narrative is related to the agenda.

The agenda is what everybody in the journalism department cares about supporting, that happens to be liberal causes today. So journalism is about advancing the agenda of the American left. I think journalism students today, to one degree or another, are propagandized, brainwashed. But at the same time, that may not be necessary because many arriving may have figured out that’s what it is. If you look at how journalists are rewarded and climb the ladder, that’s it.

A profile on a powerful person in a small town holds them up to ridicule and destroys them? (snaps fingers) That’s a resume enhancement. The who, what, when, where, why, whatever you mentioned? That’s first-year stuff. That’s boilerplate, satisfies the requirements of the curriculum, and then they get serious after they’ve glossed over that. But you stay in touch with your daughter, because I would love to know what the reaction in her classroom is when this whole idea of government monitors in newsrooms is discussed.

CALLER: It will be interesting to see what the discussions are like.

RUSH: Make sure you tell her that it was two journalism schools that came up with the idea: The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School. Those were the two places that devised this test, this study, at the behest of Mignon Clyburn. Thank you, Ellen, for the call. (interruption) The official show observer has a question. What’s the question? (interruption) Mmm-hmm. (interruption) Mmm-hmm.

What would the old guard do what? (interruption) Oh! Snerdley thinks he’s asked me a brilliant question, folks. He thinks it’s a brilliant question. See, because Snerdley is convinced that a “real journalist,” be they the biggest communist on the face of the earth, would want nothing to do with the government monitoring them, directing them, observing them, none of that, no matter how leftist they are.

So he’s asking me, “What would Cronkite’s reaction be? What would John Chancellor say if he were alive today? You know, Garrick Utley just passed away. What would Garrick Utley say?” He’s asking me, “What about Eric Sevareid?” I’ll tell you, if you want to get the answer go ask Bill Moyers. He’s one of them and he’s alive and kicking at PBS, and I’ll bet you that Bill Moyers will find a way…

Ah! Ah! I don’t want to prejudge it, because Bill Moyers will say whatever he has to make me wrong so I’m not going to predict what he would say. But what you want me to say is what you believe, which is that Cronkite wouldn’t have none of this. “He wouldn’t stand for it, whoever it was, in any administration! If it was the Johnson administration, which he loved…” Let me put it to you this way:

If the Kennedy administration, Camelot, said, “We want monitors in there. We want to make sure that you’re covering the news right. We want to find out what you’re leaving on the cutting room floor. We want to find out what isn’t making the news. We want to find out what is.” The war in Vietnam is going on and the Kennedy administration says, “We’re going to send Bob McNamara over, in fact, to find out why you’re telling all this rotten news about our bad luck in Vietnam.”

You think, you are convinced that Cronkite would stand up with righteous indignation and kick them out of there and would not want any part of it, right? You believe that the old line journalists, be they as commie lib as they might have been, wouldn’t put up with this. But you are willing to concede that the current crop — the heirs, if you will, of Cronkite… Who are they? Diane Sawyer. Who are the nightly news people? Scott Pelley. Brian Williams. The F. Chuck Todds.

You still don’t believe that I’m right that they would not have a problem with it? (interruption) You think that they would. (interruption) I know that. (interruption) Because Moyers was one! When he was doing commentary, he took over for Sevareid. When Moyers was doing commentary on the CBS Evening News with Cronkite, he came from the Johnson the administration! He was a monitor. These are revolving doors.

Don’t you understand that these journalists are, in effect, part of these administrations? That’s what people can’t get their arms around. Journalism in Washington is not in a cocoon. A journalist will leave and go work for a Congressman. Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, used to work at Time Magazine as a columnist/editor/writer. He left there, went to work for Biden, and from there went to work for Obama.

Tim Russert used to work for a member of Congress. (interruption) Moynihan, right. What’s his face, Chris Matthews, worked for Tip O’Neill. It’s an incestuous pool, a revolving door. I mentioned the other day that I saw this babe Jilllll Dougherty. (That’s how she used to pronounce her name, “Jilllll Dougherty, CNN, Moscow!”) Now she’s at the Kennedy School. So are they journalists or members of the administration? Are they journalists or are they…?

I happen to know a CNN info babe whose husband is on the staff of Jane Harman, Congresswoman from California. What’s his name? David Gregory, Meet the Depressed, his wife is a big lawyer over at Fannie Mae. To say that journalism inside the beltway is in a cocoon and those people have no relationship with the people they cover and they’re doing it objectively? They go back and forth. They’re all liberals, and one thing…

People ask me all the time, “How can a liberal Jewish person be so critical of Israel?” It’s because they’re liberals first. Liberalism… If a liberal is a liberal, that’s the most important self-identifying characteristic. Whatever else they are — feminist, Jewish, I don’t know, take your pick — liberal is first. They are always liberals first, and that is what unites them and that’s what animates them.

So whether they’re in journalism or working on The Hill or over at the White House or clerking for a Supreme Court justice or what have you, they’re liberals first and that means they’re advancing the agenda. If they’re in the bowels of the EPA, writing regulations, denying farmers in the Central Valley water in order to protect the snail darter, they are liberals first. That person at EPA might some day be hired by CBS to be a producer or an editor.

It’s just incestuous. They go back and forth. So to say that journalism is made up of people who are insulated from… You used to hear them say, “I can’t get too close to my sources. I must be able to remain objective.” That flew out the window I don’t know how long ago. Kennedy and those old guys back then, everybody in the media during Camelot, would have paid to be hired to be in the Kennedy White House and orb. It was like being part of the Beatles! It was like — I don’t know — just getting in on the hottest thing at the time, and they’d do whatever they had to do.

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