Limbaugh's profound effect on our culture

HE SAVED WHAT WAS CONSIDERED A DYING MEDIUM, AM RADIO. — RAYMOND DE SOUZA

Rush Limbaugh died this past week after an astonishing 30-plus years as the most popular talk radio host in the United States. He invented a new medium — political talk radio — and dominated it as both an entertainer and a political advocate. His career was of great consequence for the current political and cultural moment.

As an entertainer, there are few who could match his success. Three hours a day, five days a week, over three decades, his was always the No. 1 radio show. By way of comparison, David Letterman had a massively successful 33-year run in late night television, but not as the number 1 show. He had an hour a night, with an audience of about 3-4 million people. Limbaugh was on three hours a day, with an audience of some 20-25 million listeners.

I don't listen to the radio very much, and when I do, it is usually to get local weather and traffic information. And yet, I knew about Limbaugh because of his impact, which extended far beyond his listening audience.

Limbaugh offered his listeners a combination of informed commentary on the news, hard-edged opinions, a cultivated sense of grievance, compelling storytelling and rollicking laughs — he enjoyed himself immensely, while having a great deal of fun. It was a powerful formula and as the traditional news business began a 30-year decline, Limbaugh stayed on top and kept his audience.

He saved what was considered a dying medium, AM radio, and some 600 stations carried his show, many of them building their entire programming and identity around it. There are thousands of radio jobs that may not survive a post-Limbaugh radio landscape.

Limbaugh did it from the right, but all across the political spectrum there are dozens of Limbaugh imitators on radio and cable television — hosts who offer monologues on the political scene, nurturing a sense of grievance and stoking outrage. Those who most vigorously denounce Limbaugh are more like him than they would care to admit.

It is not a style that appeals to me, but its appeal is broad and deep, and persuasive to vast numbers of people.

Limbaugh went all-in for U.S. President Donald Trump, another entertainer with a 30-year run through American celebrity culture. And those commentators who thought Trump was the devil incarnate and Limbaugh was his nefarious acolyte employed the same Limbaugh toolkit to go after the former president: ostentatious grievance, manufactured outrage and degrading — if witty — insults.

I have been writing since 2015 about the growth of an entertainment style that was first nurtured in professional wrestling, which broadened its cultural impact through Muhammad Ali and then reality television. Trump then made it politically potent. Limbaugh, like Ali, was an acutely intelligent man who knew how to use insulting rhetoric, humour and braggadocio to advance serious public arguments. It is the near universal style today.

The rise of public affairs as entertainment predated Limbaugh. CNN's “Crossfire” was launched in 1982. That same year saw the launch of a weekly political punditry brawl known as “The McLaughlin Group,” which was pro-wrestling with cufflinks and ran on PBS (if you can believe that) for over 30 years. Limbaugh was just better at it than anyone else, and proved that it was possible to entertain and inform from outside the centre-left media consensus.

His most significant political impact was in widening the parameters of the debate by giving a voice to those who questioned the elite consensus. When Hillary Clinton blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” for her husband's sexual exploitation of a White House intern, it was really a complaint that Limbaugh and Fox News — which was launched by Roger Ailes, the same man who had previously produced Limbaugh's television show — were disrupting the ability of the traditional media to cover up her husband's misdeeds, as was done in previous generations.

The rise of Limbaugh and his massive audience expanded the scope of conservative media on radio, television, print and later online. Indeed, the founding the of National Post in 1998 was part of the same phenomenon, though in a more understated Canadian way.

Who gets to be part of the conversation determines how the story is told. We are seeing that in motion this week, as these pages are broadening the conversation about China. The appeasement of China's Communist regime has been a bipartisan, multi-generational consensus in Canada. If it weren't for conservative media challenging that consensus, it would never change.

Take two recent examples. Derek Sloan was bounced from the Conservative caucus by his colleagues because the party received a donation from a racist activist, albeit disguising his name, for Sloan's leadership campaign. In 2019, Liberal Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan attended celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the establishment of China's Communist regime, which is now the world's largest and most brutal tyranny. It had no effect on his political career.

It's the political class that decides what is out of bounds when it comes to odious associations, but it does so in response to the parameters of public debate. Limbaugh expanded those parameters from a most unlikely place: a solitary radio booth.

Entertainers are usually a product of their culture. It is a rare one who changes it. Rush Limbaugh was one of them.