Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a place in our world where the known
Speaker 1: things go, a corridor of the mind lined with shelves
Speaker 1: cluttered with proof. Inside. I've been cataloging my collection of
Speaker 1: evidence about propagandists, hypnotists and conspiracy theorists, labeling reels with
Speaker 1: masking tape and sharpies, organizing them by date, reel after
Speaker 1: reel of tape. It's like the Nixon Oval Office in here,
Speaker 1: recordings of the sorts of people we've been listening to
Speaker 1: all season, episode after episode, the whole light among the world,
Speaker 1: line on a man who makes his living by telling
Speaker 1: the truth. I want you to keep on going back,
Speaker 1: back and back, and your mindful of them wall of secrecy,
Speaker 1: the news media being silent, and the pants he's locked up,
Speaker 1: and the psychological profile Robert Ripley, actss Sally Maury Bernstein,
Speaker 1: May Brussel Valentin zor yeah, okay, each of them asking you,
Speaker 1: the listener, to doubt what you think you know, and
Speaker 1: very often that doubt is delivered through the medium of radio.
Speaker 1: I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
Speaker 1: the rest, all balled up together. You are, my friends,
Speaker 1: about to be exposed to the kind of bristling, cogent
Speaker 1: analysis available nowhere else. Because of this, your initial reaction
Speaker 1: may be shock and disbelief. That's the voice of mister
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jillipoor, host of a show that
Speaker 1: could hardly be more different from the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know,
Speaker 1: what we know and why sometimes it seems lately as
Speaker 1: if we don't know anything at all. Step over the
Speaker 1: threshold and along the passage of time to the year
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty eight. Don't fight it, don't even try. Just
Speaker 1: surrender yourself. Surrender yourself. That's his mantra, It's not mine.
Speaker 1: My mantra is never surrender. What's the first thing you
Speaker 1: do when you get in the car, Click the seatbelt,
Speaker 1: switch on the ignition, turn on the radio. Yeah, find
Speaker 1: the right station here a little there, you want their
Speaker 1: dingle one Grace is Roman her car. Radios first became
Speaker 1: comment in the nineteen thirties. For decades, radio was AM radio,
Speaker 1: local stations, maybe with some top of the hour news
Speaker 1: in a lot of sports, red baseball is love. Do
Speaker 1: you buy the first bank of the Bank of Sintobaty
Speaker 1: or your money grows deeply in high return certificates of
Speaker 1: the populo. Something else that had long been popular on
Speaker 1: AM radio gospel shows, the voice of the Hour of Decision,
Speaker 1: Billy Graham, So for you, for the nation, this is
Speaker 1: the Hour of Decision. By the nineteen seventies, the most
Speaker 1: popular AM radio shows were drivetime shows, the ones that
Speaker 1: aired during your commute. Rock and Roll, hosted by fast
Speaker 1: talking DJs nine O three and fourteen k on the
Speaker 1: award winning a ridy rocky roll radio show with funny
Speaker 1: and probic for all some of you. No doubt you're
Speaker 1: wondering one award I am one. I'll tell you not
Speaker 1: other than the mark warning that young buckaroo, that's the
Speaker 1: young Rush Limbaugh Jeff Christie was a named radio back
Speaker 1: then boy could graduate our name and claim a winner.
Speaker 1: Jeff royan with a East bad and also Jeff almost
Speaker 1: think he's two six packs of carefree sugar list gun
Speaker 1: against it all day. Limbaugh was born in Missouri. He
Speaker 1: went to Southeast Missouri State University for a year, but
Speaker 1: dropped out to work in radio. In nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: he got a job as a disc jockey at an
Speaker 1: AM station outside Pittsburgh, He got fired after a year
Speaker 1: and a half and went to a station called KQUV
Speaker 1: and Elmin made the twelve more empreys for you in
Speaker 1: the Camprey Rock Conser contest. Even jack Box for tomorrow
Speaker 1: is two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen. Then he
Speaker 1: got the guys that you can remember it. Bob the
Speaker 1: Carnal makes the next call to one. Limbaugh died in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one at the age of seventy. His obituaries
Speaker 1: head headlines like we're living in the world Rush Limbaugh created.
Speaker 1: And that's true. But even though you may think you
Speaker 1: know all ways, we now live in Rush Limbaugh's world.
Speaker 1: There's more to understand, and has to do with what
Speaker 1: a lot of this season has been exploring how we
Speaker 1: hear voices on the radio. There were lots of testimonials
Speaker 1: to Limbo after he died, but one comment really stuck
Speaker 1: with me. A guy wrote on YouTube his show was
Speaker 1: the only one that came in clearly, so I listened.
Speaker 1: People are slinkingly started sportive way to fail the Limbaugh
Speaker 1: Even when he was Jeff Christie, he was a big guy,
Speaker 1: wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality, a
Speaker 1: little George Costanza meets Fred Flintstone. In nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: he lost yet another job. He moved back home with
Speaker 1: his parents in Missouri. He was twenty three. It was
Speaker 1: a very tough time to try to make a career
Speaker 1: in AM radio, mainly because FM radio was on the rise,
Speaker 1: a faith free start, a threem or FM stereo car
Speaker 1: radio sounds starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of
Speaker 1: Elvis Little Richard. People bought FM radios for their houses,
Speaker 1: but the FM dial only really exploded in the nineteen seventies, when,
Speaker 1: for the first time, you could get FM in your car.
Speaker 1: At this point, AM radio was mono, just one track.
Speaker 1: FM was stereo was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to switch
Speaker 1: from plain old mono to stereo. You'd bring your car
Speaker 1: into the shop and switch out your AM radio for
Speaker 1: an FM radio with stereo speakers. This change in the
Speaker 1: sound of radio from AM to FM would have vast
Speaker 1: repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very long reverb,
Speaker 1: AM radio suffered, listenership plummeted, and then so did AD revenue.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty seven, the majority of AM radio stations
Speaker 1: were no longer making a profit, and people who worked
Speaker 1: at AM radio stations in the nineteen seventies were losing
Speaker 1: their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh, who'd been
Speaker 1: moving from job to job, had landed. All the DJs
Speaker 1: got fired. I was spared as assistant program director, and
Speaker 1: you know what that meant, programming the automation machine. Limbo
Speaker 1: didn't last long as an assistant program director. He took
Speaker 1: a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: AM radio stations were beginning to figure out that if
Speaker 1: they could leave music to the FM band and concentrate
Speaker 1: on talk shows, they could start making money again. In
Speaker 1: mono talk sounds fine, even if you might not agree
Speaker 1: with what someone's saying. The simple fact matter is that
Speaker 1: the homeless advocacy in this country is, I think, based
Speaker 1: upon fraud. In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh started a new kind of talk radio show, Incremento
Speaker 1: on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Speaker 1: Soon he had a deal for national syndication. The opinions
Speaker 1: expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program do not necessarily reflect
Speaker 1: those of WABC Radio or its management, and now here's
Speaker 1: a Rush Limbaugh. By the way, that's a gutlass disclaimer.
Speaker 1: The view is expressed by the host of this show
Speaker 1: ought to become federal law in the station and sponsors
Speaker 1: all who heartily endorsed them. The Rush Limbaugh Show was
Speaker 1: a one way wall of talk. Limbaugh was funny, he
Speaker 1: was angry. His program started with a news digest, then
Speaker 1: a series of opinions, mixed with calls from listeners who
Speaker 1: agreed with those opinions. Here's voice now, and it sounds
Speaker 1: so utterly familiar. That's because it's the voice of the
Speaker 1: political YouTuber, or of a certain sort of podcaster. Brash, annoying,
Speaker 1: no at all. But it was a new voice then,
Speaker 1: and it spoke to listeners for three hours a day,
Speaker 1: five days a week. So to give you just a
Speaker 1: bit of an idea about the show, there are no
Speaker 1: guests never. We don't talk about single issues or themes ever,
Speaker 1: unless they evolve as the program goes. It is pretty
Speaker 1: much an open line discussion each end, every day. Limba
Speaker 1: revolutionized radio open line. It was all him, even some
Speaker 1: of the ads. At a time when human resources departments
Speaker 1: were newly requiring sexual harassment training, Limbaugh spent a lot
Speaker 1: of his time on air attacking feminists, especially after Anita
Speaker 1: Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Speaker 1: Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
Speaker 1: give you two glorious items, mon Anita. Trading cards have
Speaker 1: always been for males only. It's just not fair, It's
Speaker 1: not right, ya. I still nail post. I'm Betty Freedom.
Speaker 1: Feminaz card are design the woman in mind. I remember
Speaker 1: in those years my dad listening to Limbaugh. I drove
Speaker 1: my mother nuts. I bet a lot of families had
Speaker 1: an experience like that Limbaugh. He'd say it seemed anything,
Speaker 1: so partly people tuned in for the thrill of it,
Speaker 1: to hear what he'd say next. For the rest of us, though,
Speaker 1: it was like getting kicked in the face every day.
Speaker 1: He went after feminists. He liked him mock environmentalists, gays
Speaker 1: and lesbians. He made a lot of jokes about AIDS.
Speaker 1: Despite or really because of all that, Limbaugh's audience just
Speaker 1: grew and grew. Mainly that audience was men, white men
Speaker 1: who are angry. His angry as rush seemed to be
Speaker 1: real wages for white men who had gone to college,
Speaker 1: were dropping. They're still dropping. Some of these guys really
Speaker 1: did have a lot to be angry about. Rush told
Speaker 1: him who to be angry at. The people who loved Rush.
Speaker 1: They called themselves ditto heads because they believed everything he
Speaker 1: said and would say it back. Ditto Limbo's format, the
Speaker 1: wall of talk push nearly everything else off talk radio,
Speaker 1: all the kookie chit chat and cooking shows and carpentry
Speaker 1: shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations, which for
Speaker 1: a long time had been mom and pop operations, were
Speaker 1: getting bought out by giant, consolidated national and even global corporations.
Speaker 1: Here I've got to disclose something about that consolidation. The
Speaker 1: Rush Limbough Show was eventually syndicated by an outfit called
Speaker 1: clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel rebranded itself as iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: and an arm of iHeart now sells ads for Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: which is the production house that makes the Last Archive.
Speaker 1: So this is like when the Washington Post reports on
Speaker 1: Amazon and then has to mention that the Post is
Speaker 1: owned by Jeff Bezos. Okay, the Last Archive is not
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, and iHeart doesn't own Pushkin. But still
Speaker 1: it's important to disclose these things. Limbough liked to present
Speaker 1: himself as a cowboy, a rick, bold, reckless, and unpredictable.
Speaker 1: In reality, he was more like the wonder bread of radio,
Speaker 1: the factory made white bread of radio. He was the
Speaker 1: same every goddamn day, rant, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
Speaker 1: ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
Speaker 1: was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
Speaker 1: five days a week. But the forces that had to
Speaker 1: do with Limbaugh's success had to do with more than
Speaker 1: just radio formats. For years, Limbaugh's fortunes rose while other
Speaker 1: media's fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
Speaker 1: didn't seem to mind. If you listen to this show
Speaker 1: every day, you never need to read another newspaper again,
Speaker 1: never read another magazine. I do it for you. When
Speaker 1: you get a bonus, I tell you what to think
Speaker 1: about this incredibly complicated and controversial issue. I tell you
Speaker 1: what to think. And he wasn't joking. Limba presented himself
Speaker 1: as a prophet liberals and feminine sees. They were heretics.
Speaker 1: Limbaugh was talking politics, but his show was less like
Speaker 1: a news program than like those old radio gospel shows.
Speaker 1: Politics as preaching listening as worship conservatism as a new religion.
Speaker 1: Scholars call this political sectarianism, and in this era, sectarianism
Speaker 1: was headed to Washington at GOPACK. Our mission is to
Speaker 1: gain control of the US House of Representatives. We're developing
Speaker 1: a farm team of future congressional candidates. That's audio from
Speaker 1: what's known as a GOPACK tape, one of the thousands
Speaker 1: of tapes made by a GOP political action committee that
Speaker 1: had become the mouthpiece for just one man. This is
Speaker 1: congress In nud Gingrich. As a candidate. You've probably been
Speaker 1: listening to tapes from GOPAC all year, and you know
Speaker 1: that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain basic approaches.
Speaker 1: Newt Gingrich, then a Congressman from Georgia. Gingridge, heard what
Speaker 1: Limbaugh was doing on air and in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties started to record his own version of that format
Speaker 1: through these GOP cassette tapes. If you were a Republican
Speaker 1: running for office or working on a campaign, he'd probably
Speaker 1: listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
Speaker 1: In this tape, we have a speech I gave to
Speaker 1: the Republicans in California. We decided to share with you
Speaker 1: as an example of how you can bring all the
Speaker 1: basic values together. This is the sound of modern political history,
Speaker 1: shifting gears and burning out the clutch. The tapes were
Speaker 1: mailed to thousands of people every month. One Republican from
Speaker 1: Minnesota told PBS's Frontline how crucial they were. When they
Speaker 1: would come. I mean, and you spend some time in
Speaker 1: a car, particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
Speaker 1: When they would come in the mail, I mean, I
Speaker 1: would open them up right away, and I would put
Speaker 1: them in a cassette player within twenty four hours. The
Speaker 1: purpose of the tapes was to create a single national
Speaker 1: message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads. There
Speaker 1: are two movements in America. There's a La Twing radical movement,
Speaker 1: and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority, the
Speaker 1: basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of how
Speaker 1: we think you can draw those lines. Kingridge proposed a
Speaker 1: set of dualisms for candidates to use in ads. You
Speaker 1: might think this kind of hyperpolarized rhetoric is more recent,
Speaker 1: a product of social media maybe, but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 1: We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
Speaker 1: allowing honest citizen stone guns. The radical left introduced to
Speaker 1: build a legalized sex with animals, but we oppose legal
Speaker 1: sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
Speaker 1: of sex with animals. In the early nineteen nineties, and
Speaker 1: a memo sent out with the tapes Go Back supplied
Speaker 1: candidates with a vocabulary list. It suggested words to use
Speaker 1: to help to find your campaign change opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage,
Speaker 1: who form, prosperity, cruci, aid, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
Speaker 1: hard work, initiative, common sense. Gopeck also listed words to
Speaker 1: use to describe your political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal, lie, shallow, traitors, sensationalists,
Speaker 1: in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
Speaker 1: self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete. This
Speaker 1: was political warfare on all fronts. Gingridge trained the officers,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingridge's political power grew, and so
Speaker 1: did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety one, Limbaugh appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
Speaker 1: What are you trying to do with this show? I'm
Speaker 1: trying to attract the largest audience I can and hold
Speaker 1: it for as long as I can so that I
Speaker 1: can charge advertisers confiscatory advertiser rates. This is a business.
Speaker 1: You're in it for the money. Sure, of course, I'm
Speaker 1: doing a lot of this for money. That's Limbaugh earning
Speaker 1: points for being honest. It's also a tactic. Donald Trump
Speaker 1: would adopt honesty about loving money. Listeners adored it. For
Speaker 1: talk radio, the money came rolling in, and not just
Speaker 1: for Limbaugh. Between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: an average of twenty new talk radio stations went into
Speaker 1: business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
Speaker 1: not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
Speaker 1: they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners. No spots,
Speaker 1: no back, no information sat Kay BBL Talk Radio, and
Speaker 1: Al Springfield's favorite conservative and author of the well selling
Speaker 1: book Only Turkeys, Half Left Wings, Ladies and Gentlemen, Burch Barlow.
Speaker 1: You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
Speaker 1: the Simpsons Good Morning, fellow freedomlikers, Burch Barlow, the fourth
Speaker 1: branch of government, the fifty first State. The more famous
Speaker 1: Limbaugh got, the more worried observers got, especially about how
Speaker 1: he talked about talk, how he talked about the freedom
Speaker 1: of speech, how he talked about fairness itself. This is
Speaker 1: also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator. There is
Speaker 1: no First Amendment here except for me. Well right, The
Speaker 1: First Amendment only constrains the government, not a privately owned
Speaker 1: radio station. But for most of the twentieth century there'd
Speaker 1: been some rules in place. Rules the date to a
Speaker 1: time when people understood just how dangerous radio could be
Speaker 1: if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties, a guy
Speaker 1: named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from President Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: Dirr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best known to
Speaker 1: history for something he did much later in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: when he and his wife bailed Rosa Parks out of jail. Anyway,
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty one, Fdr appointed dir to the Federal
Speaker 1: Communications Commission the FCC. Point in the head of is
Speaker 1: that the FCC is the federal agency that regulates who
Speaker 1: can get broadcast licenses to use the airwaves, which after
Speaker 1: all belonged to the public. I want the FCC onknew
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing about it, but at the time we will
Speaker 1: mother fret all the actress broadcasts. I did an episode
Speaker 1: earlier this season called The Inner Front. It talks about
Speaker 1: how the US government monitored Radio Berlin and Radio Tokyo.
Speaker 1: That was part of the FCC's job during the Second
Speaker 1: World War, but the content of those enemy broadcasts really
Speaker 1: changed how dr and the FCC thought about the power
Speaker 1: of radio. Oh my god, this is a terrific medium.
Speaker 1: The other can be magnificent or it can completely ruin
Speaker 1: you if you get this thing in their long hands.
Speaker 1: So then add again to take a more closer look
Speaker 1: at an American broadcast. The FCC started enforcing some rules
Speaker 1: that were on the books but that have been mostly ignored,
Speaker 1: and Dur's influence would lead to a new rule to
Speaker 1: would shape broadcasting for the next half century. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine, the FCC established what became known as the
Speaker 1: Fairness Doctrine. Under the American system of broadcasting, the individual
Speaker 1: licensees of radio stations have the responsibility for determining the
Speaker 1: specific program material to be broadcast over their stations, so
Speaker 1: you could broadcast whatever you wanted. Except This choice, however,
Speaker 1: must be exercised in a manner consistent with the basic
Speaker 1: policy of the Congress that radio being maintained as a
Speaker 1: medium of free speech for the general public as a whole,
Speaker 1: rather than as an outlet for the purely personal or
Speaker 1: private interests of the licensee. The fairness doctrine is about
Speaker 1: the public interest. It says the government has an interest
Speaker 1: in what radio stations broadcast. It says that on the
Speaker 1: issues of the day, radio stations have to broadcast more
Speaker 1: than one view. This requires that licensees to vote a
Speaker 1: reasonable percentage of their broadcast time to the discussion of
Speaker 1: public issues of interest in the community served by their stations,
Speaker 1: and that such programs be designed so that the public
Speaker 1: has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposition positions. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by way
Speaker 1: of Congressional action, and the Johnson administration added a guarantee
Speaker 1: for a right of reply after a criticism during a broadcast.
Speaker 1: It wasn't often enforced, but it did happen sometimes like
Speaker 1: when Medgar Evers once got seventeen minutes of airtime to
Speaker 1: respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when conservatives
Speaker 1: attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test band treaty, stations were required
Speaker 1: to play a protest band speech by the President himself.
Speaker 1: This was exactly the kind of thing that ticked conservatives off.
Speaker 1: Rules that required listeners to hear more from Edgar Evers
Speaker 1: hear more from President Kennedy. All mankind has been struggling
Speaker 1: to escape from the dokening prospect of mass destruction on Earth.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty nine, the Supreme Court affirmed much of
Speaker 1: the fairness doctrine, but conservatives are getting more and more
Speaker 1: peeved about it, believing that the fairness Doctrine suppressed conservative views.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen eighties, they really wanted to get rid
Speaker 1: of it, and it was vulnerable because it was a regulation,
Speaker 1: not a law. In nineteen eighty five, a new FCC
Speaker 1: head appointed by President Reagan said he would fight to
Speaker 1: end the fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Speaker 1: Congress a bill that would have established the doctrine as law,
Speaker 1: but Reagan vetoed it and Congress didn't have the votes
Speaker 1: to override his veto. The doctrine was dead, and now
Speaker 1: here's Rice Limbaugh. Limbaugh could not have operated if the
Speaker 1: fairness doctrine had still been in place, at least not
Speaker 1: without worrying that the FCC might come after him because
Speaker 1: he used his airtime to promote partisanship. In fact, he
Speaker 1: was more than a partisan. Limbaugh wanted to be a kingmaker.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan
Speaker 1: failed to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
Speaker 1: But when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Limbaugh sounded a
Speaker 1: battle cry. He made it his mission to take down
Speaker 1: the Clintons, both of them. The Clintons are running around
Speaker 1: on this national tour. Now, you know, I don't know
Speaker 1: how else to say this. I mean, the president gets
Speaker 1: away when he says something it isn't true later being
Speaker 1: told about, Oh yeah, I was an inadvertent statement. The
Speaker 1: motto of this administration every day is what can we
Speaker 1: do to fool them today? Bill Clinton for sure did
Speaker 1: sometimes lie, no question, but fooling people was not the
Speaker 1: motto of his administration. Clinton got exasperated. You can hear
Speaker 1: him on Saint Louis am radio practically begging for a
Speaker 1: right of reply after I get off the radio today
Speaker 1: with you, Russ Lamball have three hours to say whatever
Speaker 1: he wants, and I won't have any opportunity to respond.
Speaker 1: And there's no truth detector. You won't get on afterward
Speaker 1: and say what was true and what was In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three, Democrats in Congress tried to bring back the
Speaker 1: fairness doctrine. Limbaugh like to call their effort the hush
Speaker 1: Rush Bill, but other people on talk radio didn't see
Speaker 1: it that way. I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
Speaker 1: That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety three. I like it. I like the fact that
Speaker 1: we as broadcasters have to be fair. It is not
Speaker 1: out to get any broadcast I know Rush Limbaugh thinks
Speaker 1: they're out to get them. All it means is that
Speaker 1: a station who has if you have eight right wing hosts,
Speaker 1: you better put some left wing hosts on. I don't
Speaker 1: know what's wrong with that, but the fairness doctrine was
Speaker 1: not reinstated, and in nineteen ninety four, in the midterm elections,
Speaker 1: Republicans flipped the Senate and the House. It was a wipeout.
Speaker 1: They took ten governorships, they won state legislatures. They elected
Speaker 1: Newt Kingbridge Speaker of the House. The Freshman Republicans in
Speaker 1: the House named Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class,
Speaker 1: and he went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged
Speaker 1: by reporters asking him how talk radio had led the
Speaker 1: Conservatives to victory. These reporters who asked me questions about
Speaker 1: talk radio were all trying to say, in a roundabout way,
Speaker 1: that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted
Speaker 1: them to mind numbed robots, and every day would send
Speaker 1: out code in my show that would force them to
Speaker 1: march to the polls on November the eighth of the
Speaker 1: poll the lever I wanted them to pull. Listening to
Speaker 1: Limbaugh's speech to the Freshman Republican members of the House,
Speaker 1: you can hear them giggling as Limbaugh turned to a
Speaker 1: new topic, reports of secret meetings that Bill and Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton were holding in the White House about me. They're
Speaker 1: trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
Speaker 1: They're scouring America looking for some liberal host who can
Speaker 1: automatically end up on six hundred and sixty radio stations.
Speaker 1: They think that they can just pluck some liberal out
Speaker 1: of the sky and put him on the radio and
Speaker 1: create a bunch of liberal mind numb robots. Point taken
Speaker 1: Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numbed robots. But remember
Speaker 1: he asked his listeners to surrender to his point of view,
Speaker 1: and millions of them did just that. You might not
Speaker 1: like the fairness doctrine. You might want some other sort
Speaker 1: of guidelines or mechanisms in place, you might want none
Speaker 1: at all. But whatever your view, you've still got to
Speaker 1: wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't really work if
Speaker 1: people only listened to one kind of political opinion all day,
Speaker 1: every day. Limbo was right about one thing, though, in
Speaker 1: this era with the fairness doctrine dead, some people really
Speaker 1: were looking for a liberal version of him, not someone
Speaker 1: who would hush rush, someone who would crush rush any
Speaker 1: welcome the Al Franken Show. I'm Al Franken. The left
Speaker 1: answer to Rush Limbo would be for a while, this
Speaker 1: guy Alan Stuart Franken, a comedian best known at the
Speaker 1: time for his work on Saturday Night Live. Franken had
Speaker 1: written a book called Rush Limbo is a Big, fat
Speaker 1: Idiot and Other observations. He came out in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: The audiobook version gives you an idea of Franken's vibe
Speaker 1: at the time. I thought the title, aside from the
Speaker 1: obvious advantage of being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books.
Speaker 1: Let me explain why it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: by pointing out that he's a big lard butt. Franken
Speaker 1: told he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite. If Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: were to write a book about you, or would its
Speaker 1: title be The Guy who got me, the guy who
Speaker 1: held me accountable, the guy who nailed my ass. Franken
Speaker 1: owned his comedy style deadpan, a bit obnoxious, part smart alec,
Speaker 1: part frat boy. Here he is talking to an audience
Speaker 1: of college students. What I do is in propaganda. What
Speaker 1: I do is taking what they say and using it
Speaker 1: against them. What I do is jiu jitsu. They say
Speaker 1: something ridiculous, and then I subject them to scorn and ridicule.
Speaker 1: That's my job. Franken had a lot in common with Limbaugh.
Speaker 1: They were both born in nineteen fifty one, They're both
Speaker 1: from the Middle of the country. Limbo's from Missouri, Franken
Speaker 1: grew up in Minnesota. They both loved to perform. Then
Speaker 1: there are the difference. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken
Speaker 1: graduated from Harvard. The same year that Franken published Rushed
Speaker 1: Limbaugh as a big fat Idiot, a new cable television
Speaker 1: network started up, Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced.
Speaker 1: This was the cable TV version of stuff that Limbaugh
Speaker 1: and Gingrich had pioneered. Really, you can put everything on
Speaker 1: early Fox News into one of two bins. The first
Speaker 1: labeled Limbaugh, the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limbaugh,
Speaker 1: the more professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the
Speaker 1: same in the end, lots of opinion monologus getting viewers
Speaker 1: to distrust other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: talk radio was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limbaugh did
Speaker 1: a lot of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC p MSNBC.
Speaker 1: He called US News and World Report, US snooze, Meet
Speaker 1: the press, meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through
Speaker 1: the roof, both for Fox News and for talk radio.
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton got caught jump legant turn Monica Lewinsky the
Speaker 1: blue stand dress. All this time, and especially after nine
Speaker 1: to eleven, a lot of liberals were still wishing there
Speaker 1: was a liberal Limbaugh, So they started a new radio
Speaker 1: network called Air America. Air America would launch all kinds
Speaker 1: of careers, including Rachel Maddows. Before joining MSNBC, she had
Speaker 1: her own Air America show. Al Franken came to Air
Speaker 1: America from the USO. He'd been going on tours entertaining
Speaker 1: the troops overseas Bob Hopestyle. He saw that work as
Speaker 1: a chance to show that right wingers didn't have a
Speaker 1: monopoly on patriotism. Franken, like all of Air America, had
Speaker 1: the idea that left radio would offer listeners the opposition
Speaker 1: positions that the fairness doctrine would have required if it
Speaker 1: had still been in place, so he didn't put it
Speaker 1: in such lofty terms. It's about answering these fuckheads that
Speaker 1: have been on the air and lyon and delivering this simplistic,
Speaker 1: black and white babble about how the world works, as
Speaker 1: if they know something, and they have built this infrastructure
Speaker 1: of feeding people misinformation about about economic justice and about
Speaker 1: how our society is run. And it's about time that
Speaker 1: somebody fought back to talk about the ride wings dishonesty.
Speaker 1: Franken launched his own Air America radio show in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four. He delivered something surprising, an old fashioned
Speaker 1: variety show sort of Marx Brothers, but about politics with
Speaker 1: lots of skits. Shall brought to you by the Union
Speaker 1: of Jewish Archaeologists. We look at fossils of early man
Speaker 1: and asked was this a jill? What Al Franken was
Speaker 1: doing was different from anything else on the air. Mostly
Speaker 1: though it was different from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Everything
Speaker 1: about Franken show was designed an opposition to Limbaugh's show.
Speaker 1: Unlike Limbaugh, who only had guests occasionally, franken show featured them,
Speaker 1: and unlike Limbaugh, Franken invited calls from people who disagreed
Speaker 1: with him. When Franken did monologues, he often got serious.
Speaker 1: In the early sixties, we'd watch TV. We watched news,
Speaker 1: rare TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
Speaker 1: Southern sheriff's sicking police dogs on black demonstrators. My dad
Speaker 1: so that no Jew can be for that. The most
Speaker 1: important part of franken show came when he fact checked
Speaker 1: the Rush Limbaugh Show. How many people listen to him?
Speaker 1: Fifteen twenty million, right, right, right? Okay, so those people
Speaker 1: believe him, right, yeah, okay, so most of his listeners
Speaker 1: believe is seventy five percent people making minimum wage are
Speaker 1: teenagers in their first job. I had our staff look
Speaker 1: at up. Sixty one point one percent of people earning
Speaker 1: minimum wage are twenty or over. You know, we got
Speaker 1: our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he
Speaker 1: got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt. Franken put
Speaker 1: on a good show, but Air America turned out to
Speaker 1: be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run, beset
Speaker 1: five financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for Al
Speaker 1: Franken's show never got above a million and a half
Speaker 1: weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience of
Speaker 1: the Rush Limbo Show. There are lots of theories about
Speaker 1: why left wing radio failed. One of them is that
Speaker 1: liberals would rather listen to something more thoughtful and temperate
Speaker 1: like NPR. But then again, liberals flocked to Comedy Central,
Speaker 1: where John Stuart's Daily Show and The Colbert Report were
Speaker 1: very much in the mold of Air America, so I
Speaker 1: tend to think the problem was the company. Franken jumped
Speaker 1: ship before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: he went off the air and announced his run for
Speaker 1: a Senate seat from Minnesota. Two thousand and eight was
Speaker 1: a wild election year. Barack Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination,
Speaker 1: and after he defeated Hillary Clinton, he made his historic
Speaker 1: bid for the presidency. Rush Limbah turned the fire hose
Speaker 1: of his fury from the Clintons to the Obama's. He
Speaker 1: played on air a song called Barack the Magic Negro.
Speaker 1: Obama decided to let that pass, which is likely why
Speaker 1: you've never heard of it. Obama won in something close
Speaker 1: to a landslide, and Al Franken became the new Senator
Speaker 1: from Minnesota. In Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was mostly
Speaker 1: known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working. In
Speaker 1: addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next two years,
Speaker 1: the budget deal undoes some of the extreme across the
Speaker 1: board cuts of the sequester that will enable us to
Speaker 1: make more In twenty fourteen, Franken won reelection to the Senate,
Speaker 1: he was sort of a non story. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh's
Speaker 1: tirades grew louder and louder all through Obama's two terms
Speaker 1: in office. Limbaugh urged obstructionism, the rejection of all compromise.
Speaker 1: Let's say, as conservatives liberals demand that we be bipartisan
Speaker 1: with them in Congress. What they mean is we check
Speaker 1: our core principles at the door, come and let them
Speaker 1: run the show, and then agree with them. That's my
Speaker 1: part ship to them. Okay, I've got to stop the tape.
Speaker 1: I am so sick of this. Al Franken, when he
Speaker 1: was writing that book about Limbaugh, said it took a
Speaker 1: real toll on him to have to listen to this
Speaker 1: guy all the time. I feel that it's like reading
Speaker 1: hate mail. To be honest, I find listening to Al
Speaker 1: Franken pretty grading. Two. But when you're researching a historical development,
Speaker 1: you don't choose the evidence. You enjoy. Your job is
Speaker 1: to listen to all of it. To us, by partisanship
Speaker 1: is them being forced to agree with us after we
Speaker 1: have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that
Speaker 1: has to be what you're fuck is wrong. In two,
Speaker 1: thou and sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
Speaker 1: a new opponent. Politicians are all talk and no action.
Speaker 1: That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
Speaker 1: fighting the far right. I'm Al Franken, Minnesota Senator and
Speaker 1: world renowned expert on right wing megalomaniacs, Roch Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly,
Speaker 1: and now Donald Trump. And that was the right genealogy
Speaker 1: Limbaugh made Trump possible. Trump's whole alone can fix it.
Speaker 1: Thing that was straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that
Speaker 1: Limbaugh cultivated, those ditto heads that became Trump is um,
Speaker 1: those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh. All this led the political
Speaker 1: outsider Trump to an unexpected victory. But long after Trump won,
Speaker 1: Limbaugh remained fixed. Stated on the outgoing president, the first
Speaker 1: moment that Trump does anything that he is the unraveling
Speaker 1: of an Obama agenda item. Obama is going to be
Speaker 1: on TV. Hey you I won't go on TV. I'll
Speaker 1: glad you're exclusive Trump. Trump's about to destroy Obama. I
Speaker 1: find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong it was, Because,
Speaker 1: of course, Obama did not go on television and damn
Speaker 1: Trump's every move. Instead, Obama kept quiet for pretty much
Speaker 1: all four years of Trump's administration. Obama played by old
Speaker 1: school rules. The ex president steps out of politics, the
Speaker 1: rules that every other American president of whatever party had
Speaker 1: played by from the beginning. Limbaugh, though, seemed no longer
Speaker 1: able to imagine that anyone still played by rules. Twenty
Speaker 1: first century political warfare is a battle for truth, people
Speaker 1: like to say, But more and more, I think it
Speaker 1: has been a battle about doubt. Well, leave only me
Speaker 1: doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was the voice
Speaker 1: of America. Al Franken tried to fact check him. Then
Speaker 1: Donald Trump said he was the voice of America, and
Speaker 1: then all hell broke loose. You can do anything whatever
Speaker 1: you want. I could do anything. After the Access Hollywood
Speaker 1: tape came out just before the twenty sixteen election, Trump
Speaker 1: said it was just locker room talk. I've been in
Speaker 1: a lot of locker rooms. That's Al Franken on Late
Speaker 1: Night with Seth Myers. I you know, I belong to
Speaker 1: a health club in Minneapolis. I think you can tell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can tell. And our locker room banter is stuff
Speaker 1: like is Trump crazy? In the end, though, one politician
Speaker 1: who would be brought down for Trump sins would be
Speaker 1: Al Franken. In twenty seventeen, a conservative talk radio host
Speaker 1: named Leanne Tweeden went on the air at KBC in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles with a bomb show, who is your abuser,
Speaker 1: Senator Al Franken. It was in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: We were going on a USO tour. He gave me
Speaker 1: the script and you know, it was full of sexual innuendos,
Speaker 1: and it was supposed to be funny, you know. Tweeden
Speaker 1: told the story of how back in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: she and Franken had been together in Kuwait backstage had
Speaker 1: a USO tour, rehearsing for the show, and he matches
Speaker 1: his mouth up against mine and he sticks his tongue
Speaker 1: in my mouth and as it happens, it happens so fast,
Speaker 1: and he puts his tongue in my mouth and his
Speaker 1: mouth is just wet and slimy. I was violated. I
Speaker 1: was disgusted. That's not what I was expecting. All I
Speaker 1: could think about was that's what you wrote that in
Speaker 1: the script for, so you could do that to me. Also,
Speaker 1: there was a cringey photo. A photo has surfaced today
Speaker 1: showing Tweeden asleep on the flight back home and it
Speaker 1: reveals Franken groping her. Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but
Speaker 1: then seven other women made accusations against him, mostly about
Speaker 1: unwanted touching. Pressured by his Democratic Senate colleagues, Franken resigned.
Speaker 1: His speech on the Senate floor was bitter. I have
Speaker 1: all people am aware that there is some irony in
Speaker 1: the fact that I am leaving while a man who
Speaker 1: is bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault
Speaker 1: sits in the Oval office. When the New Yorkers Jane
Speaker 1: Mayre reinvestigated the case, Franken told her that he regretted resigning.
Speaker 1: Seven current and former senators who urged him to resign
Speaker 1: said they regretted it too. His mayor told NPR there
Speaker 1: were holes in Tweeden's story. She had ever been subjected
Speaker 1: to any fact checking. She had never produced any corroborators.
Speaker 1: And I spoke to eight people on that USO tour
Speaker 1: who had no political ACHENDA. Most of them were in
Speaker 1: the military, and they were right there and they just
Speaker 1: didn't say a woy she saw it. As mayor pointed out,
Speaker 1: Leanne Tweeden claimed Franken wrote the controversial skit in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six for her but in fact, and this
Speaker 1: is indisputable he wrote it in two thousand and three.
Speaker 1: Other actresses had played that same role, but something else
Speaker 1: was lost in the frenzy around Tweeden's allegations. Her employer,
Speaker 1: k ABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden is
Speaker 1: a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh, and
Speaker 1: k ABC did not reach out to get a comment
Speaker 1: from al Franken about Tweeden's accusations before airing them because
Speaker 1: a right to reply that was a rule that dated
Speaker 1: to the forgotten era of the fairness doctrine. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying Al Franken is the hero of the story. He's not,
Speaker 1: but he isn't the villain either. Hyperpolarized politics will always
Speaker 1: tend to dualism, good versus evil. The error of the
Speaker 1: left is that it keeps joining this game of mayhem
Speaker 1: instead of restoring the rules. In February of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
Speaker 1: of Freedom. Here tonight is a special man beloved by
Speaker 1: millions of Americans, who just received a Stage four advanced
Speaker 1: cancer diagnosis. This is not good news. But what is
Speaker 1: good news is that he is the greatest fighter and
Speaker 1: winner that you will ever meet. Limbaugh was dying of
Speaker 1: lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering in the political wilderness.
Speaker 1: All that year, Trump and Limb kept saying that Democrats
Speaker 1: were going to steal the twenty twenty election, but stealing
Speaker 1: elections was a go pack golden oldie, a two knute
Speaker 1: Gingridge had played back in nineteen eighty eight. They're gonna
Speaker 1: buy a registration, They're gonna buy votes, They're gonna turn
Speaker 1: out votes, They're gonna steal votes. They're gonna do anything
Speaker 1: they can. Now you have to understand that, stop the steal,
Speaker 1: Gingridge said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty
Speaker 1: he was saying it all over again. Two days after
Speaker 1: the election, no one should be of any doubt. You
Speaker 1: are watching an effort to steal the presidency. Ansis Joe
Speaker 1: Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then two
Speaker 1: months later, on January sixth, the next episode of The
Speaker 1: Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many rovers of
Speaker 1: doubt that dumped us into this sea of political gadab astrophe,
Speaker 1: the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
Speaker 1: the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Speaker 1: Against this backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
Speaker 1: right wing media began to crumble. A corporation that owns
Speaker 1: talk radio stations across the country ordered its hosts to
Speaker 1: stop saying the election was stolen and told them instead
Speaker 1: to induce national calm. Now, Rush Limbo, though he was
Speaker 1: having none of it. There's a lot of people calling
Speaker 1: for the end of violence. There's a lot of conservatives
Speaker 1: social media who say that any violence or aggression at
Speaker 1: all is unacceptable, regardless of the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams,
Speaker 1: Thomas Payne, the actual Tea Party guys the minute Lexington
Speaker 1: and Conquered didn't feel that way. Rush Limbaugh died six
Speaker 1: weeks after that broadcast. The King of AM Radio left
Speaker 1: behind in America more bewildered and angry than ever, the
Speaker 1: nation split by a growing canyon of talk with no
Speaker 1: bridges of meaning. That canyon looked like it might just
Speaker 1: swallow up the oldest democracy in the world. The Last
Speaker 1: Archive is written and hosted by me Jill Lapour. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben Natt of Hafrey.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Barton, and our executive producer is
Speaker 1: Mia Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by
Speaker 1: Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
Speaker 1: of Stellwagen Sympinet. Our research assistants are Kamani Panthier and
Speaker 1: Lillie Richmond. Our full proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne,
Speaker 1: Matthias boss Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Perella,
Speaker 1: Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton. Special thanks to Brian Rosenwald
Speaker 1: for his book Talk Radio's America. We couldn't have written
Speaker 1: this episode without it, and thanks to Simon Leek. The
Speaker 1: Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin
Speaker 1: thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz, Carly mcgliori,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig
Speaker 1: and Daniella Lacan. Many of us out effects are from
Speaker 1: Harry Janette Junior and the Star Jenette Foundation. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
Speaker 1: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jillapoor.