Speaker 1: Pushkin. I promise not to get too technical with you,
Speaker 1: but bear with me for a second. I am speaking
Speaker 1: to you now through an electro voice ARI twenty microphone.
Speaker 1: It's black with a mesh cap at the top, kind
Speaker 1: of clunky, very eighties looking. It's pretty weighty. I think
Speaker 1: if you clubbed someone with it, you could probably knock
Speaker 1: them unconscious. Same deal if you just talk real slow
Speaker 1: and boring. Some people, people who spend all their time
Speaker 1: thinking about recording equipment, think it sounds honky in the parlance.
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure what that means. In any way,
Speaker 1: I like it. My Ari twenty, however, is not gold plated.
Speaker 1: But today on the show, we have the story of
Speaker 1: somebody who's was Rush Limbaugh is probably the most famous
Speaker 1: conservative talk radio host of the twentieth and twenty first century.
Speaker 1: He was a larger than life personnel, and he contributed
Speaker 1: a whole lot to the hyper partisan, hyper polarized media
Speaker 1: landscape we live in today. Making the story you're about
Speaker 1: to hear, we listened to a lot of Rush limbat tape,
Speaker 1: and when you listen to enough of it, you begin
Speaker 1: to feel his voice like it's hammering into your skull.
Speaker 1: Whatever you think of the man's politics. He was an
Speaker 1: all time Hall of Fame shock chock. He was very,
Speaker 1: very good at his job. When he really wanted to
Speaker 1: make a point, he'd lean in really close to the
Speaker 1: microphone like this. It's called eating the microphone. Well, the
Speaker 1: episode I'm about to play you is about how that
Speaker 1: gold plated microphone eight American politics. Since the beginning of radio,
Speaker 1: people have worried about its power. On the radio, millions
Speaker 1: of people can hear a single voice all at the
Speaker 1: same time, with sound effects and on scene reporting, radio
Speaker 1: could put images and ideas into the listener's mind, your mind.
Speaker 1: People thought it was so powerful it could be a
Speaker 1: great tool for democracy, a way to educate everyone in
Speaker 1: the country. But if radio was that powerful, couldn't it
Speaker 1: be a tool for totalitarianism and groupthink. In nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 1: Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Gerbels wrote, the German radio, under
Speaker 1: national socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct
Speaker 1: instrument for educating and restructuring the German nation end quote.
Speaker 1: In the US people were worried about that version of
Speaker 1: the radio, so they made laws and rules and norms
Speaker 1: to keep it at bay, the fairness doctrine, equal time.
Speaker 1: Those were some of them. But surveying the last one
Speaker 1: hundred years of media history, you might get the feeling
Speaker 1: that fairness and equality haven't really been the trajectory. This
Speaker 1: episode looks at what went wrong with the media and
Speaker 1: politics and points to the history of the moment we're
Speaker 1: in now, where it seems as if every American lives
Speaker 1: in his or her own version of reality. From our
Speaker 1: second season, recorded back in twenty twenty one, Here's hush Rush.
Speaker 2: There's a place in our world where the known things go.
Speaker 2: A corridor of the mind, lined with shelves cluttered with proof. Inside.
Speaker 2: I've been cataloging my collection of evidence about propagandists, hypnotists
Speaker 2: and conspiracy theorists, labeling reels with masking tape and sharpies,
Speaker 2: organizing them by date, reel after reel of tape. It's
Speaker 2: like the Nixon Novle Office in here, recordings of the
Speaker 2: sorts of people we've been listening to all season, episode
Speaker 2: after episode.
Speaker 3: Your command of whole life in the months of worldwide lungfuls.
Speaker 4: The man who makes his living by telling the truth, the.
Speaker 5: Man who I got to say.
Speaker 4: I want you to keep on going back and back
Speaker 4: and back in your mind, the wall of secrecy, the
Speaker 4: news media being silent, and the Patsy's locked up, and
Speaker 4: the psychological profile.
Speaker 2: Robert Ripley, access Sally, Maury Bernstein, May Brussel, Valentine, Yeah, boys,
Speaker 2: Kaya and I I mean, each of them asking you,
Speaker 2: the listener, to doubt what you think you know, and
Speaker 2: very often that doubt is delivered through the medium of radio.
Speaker 2: I've got just one more of these voices. He's all
Speaker 2: the rest, all balled up together.
Speaker 6: You are, my.
Speaker 7: Friends, about to be exposed to the kind of bristling,
Speaker 7: cogent analysis available nowhere else. Because of this, your initial
Speaker 7: reaction may be shock and disbelief.
Speaker 2: That's the voice of mister Rush Limbaugh. And I'm Jill Lapour,
Speaker 2: host of a show that could hardly be more different
Speaker 2: from the Rush Limbaugh Show. Welcome to the Last Archive,
Speaker 2: the show about how we know what we know and
Speaker 2: why sometimes it seems lately as if we don't know
Speaker 2: anything at all. Step over the threshold and along the
Speaker 2: passage of time to the year nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: Don't fight it, don't even try. Just surrender yourself.
Speaker 2: Surrender yourself that's his mantra, it's not mine. My mantra
Speaker 2: is never surrender. What's the first thing you do when
Speaker 2: you get in the car, Collect the seatbelt, switch on
Speaker 2: the ignition, Turn on the radio. Yeah, find the right station.
Speaker 2: Here's a little there you want there, jingle one gracious Roman.
Speaker 4: Her just say times.
Speaker 2: Carry radios first became common in the nineteen thirties. For
Speaker 2: decades radio was am radio, local stations, maybe with some
Speaker 2: top of the hour news and a lot of sports.
Speaker 8: Baseball.
Speaker 9: You by the first bag of the bank of since
Speaker 9: that or your money grows safely and high return certificates
Speaker 9: of the body.
Speaker 2: Something else that had long been popular on AM radio
Speaker 2: gospel shows.
Speaker 6: The voice of the Hour of Decision, Billy Graham, So
Speaker 6: for you, for the nation, this is the Hour of Decision.
Speaker 2: By the nineteen seventies, the most popular AM radio shows
Speaker 2: were drivetime shows, the ones that aired during your commute.
Speaker 2: Rock and Roll hosted by fast talking djsk.
Speaker 10: Nine oh three and fourteen k on the award winning
Speaker 10: Ye Rock Game.
Speaker 11: Roll Over the show with Bunny and Product for all
Speaker 11: some of you, no doubts, no wondering, one award.
Speaker 5: I have won.
Speaker 7: I'll tell you not out of the Marconia Warren More
Speaker 7: Textlent Rock Kennery, that.
Speaker 2: Young Boogaroo, that's the young Rush Limbaugh. Jeff Christy, this
Speaker 2: is non to radio backs in.
Speaker 4: Boy, congratulate our name and acclaiment winners.
Speaker 7: Jeff round With of Eastmont.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you, Jem I will think you twelve six
Speaker 5: packs of Carefree sugarlist gun to get to it all day.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh was born in Missouri. He went to Southeast Missouri
Speaker 2: State University for a year, but dropped out to work
Speaker 2: in radio. In nineteen seventy one, he got a job
Speaker 2: as a disc jockey at an AM station outside Pittsburgh.
Speaker 2: He got fired after a year and a half and
Speaker 2: went to a station called.
Speaker 7: Kqv And that one time made the twelve more entries
Speaker 7: for you in the Camfree Rock Concert contrast.
Speaker 5: You and Jack Box for Tomorrow is.
Speaker 7: Two hundred and forty dollars and fourteen sent the lot
Speaker 7: of guys that you can remember it. Bob deccannell makes
Speaker 7: the next.
Speaker 5: Call the one.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh died in twenty twenty one at the age of seventy.
Speaker 2: His obituaries head headlines like We're living in the world.
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh created and that's true. But even though you
Speaker 2: may think you know all the ways we now live
Speaker 2: in Rush Limbaugh's world, there's more to understand. It has
Speaker 2: to do with what a lot of this season has
Speaker 2: been exploring how we hear voices on the radio. There
Speaker 2: were lots of testimonials to Limbo after he died, but
Speaker 2: one comment really stuck with me. A guy wrote on
Speaker 2: YouTube his show was the only one that came in clearly.
Speaker 4: So I listened.
Speaker 7: People are thinking of a Jefferson Startist show.
Speaker 5: Work of way details them.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh even when he was Jeff Christi. He was a
Speaker 2: big guy, wide grin waved his hands a lot, big personality,
Speaker 2: a little George Costanza meets Fred Flinstone. In nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 2: he lost yet another job. He moved back home with
Speaker 2: his parents in Missouri. He was twenty three. It was
Speaker 2: a very tough time to try to make a career
Speaker 2: in AM radio, mainly because FM radio was on the rise.
Speaker 5: FM radio a fight free static three FM or FM
Speaker 5: stereo car radio. Child Survey It's out of silent day.
Speaker 2: Starting in the nineteen fifties, the era of Elvis the
Speaker 2: Little Richard, people bought FM radios for their houses. But
Speaker 2: the FMI I only really exploded in the nineteen seventies, when,
Speaker 2: for the first time, you could get FM in your car.
Speaker 2: At this point, AM radio was mono, just one track.
Speaker 2: FM was stereo. It was immersive. Naturally, everyone wanted to
Speaker 2: switch from plain old mono to stereo. He'd bring your
Speaker 2: car into the shop and switch out your AM radio
Speaker 2: for an FM radio with stereo speakers. Seem this change
Speaker 2: in the sound of radio from AM to FM would
Speaker 2: have vast repercussions for the history of knowledge. A very
Speaker 2: long reverb, AM radio suffered, listenership plummeted, and then so
Speaker 2: did AD revenue. By nineteen eighty seven, the majority of
Speaker 2: AM radio stations were no longer making a profit, and
Speaker 2: people who worked at AM radio stations in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies were losing their jobs, including in Kansas City, where Limbaugh,
Speaker 2: who'd been moving from job to job had landed.
Speaker 12: All the DJs got fired.
Speaker 11: I was spared as assistant program director, and you know
Speaker 11: what that meant, programming the automation machine.
Speaker 2: Limba didn't last long as an assistant program director. He
Speaker 2: took a job instead with the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: AM radio stations were beginning to figure out that if
Speaker 2: they could leave music to the FM band and concentrate
Speaker 2: on talk shows, they could start making money again. In
Speaker 2: mono talk sounds fine, even if you might not agree
Speaker 2: with what someone's saying.
Speaker 7: The simple fact matter is that the homeless advocacy in
Speaker 7: this country is, I think, based upon fraud.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty four, broadcasting under his own name, Limbaugh
Speaker 2: started a new kind of talk radio show in Sacramento
Speaker 2: on KFBK. He pretty much invented a whole new format.
Speaker 2: Soon he had a deal for national syndication.
Speaker 4: The opinions expressed on the Rush Limbaugh program did not
Speaker 4: necessarily reflect those of WABC Radio or its management, and
Speaker 4: now here's Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 7: Either way. That's a Gutlass disclaimer. The view is expressed
Speaker 7: by the host of this show ought to become federal
Speaker 7: law in the station and sponsors all who heartily endorse them.
Speaker 2: The Rush Limbaugh Show was a one way wall of talk.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh was funny, he was angry. His program started with
Speaker 2: a news digest, then a series of opinions mixed with
Speaker 2: calls from listeners who agreed with those opinions. Year's voice now,
Speaker 2: and it sounds so utterly familiar. That's because it's the
Speaker 2: voice of the political YouTuber, or of a certain sort
Speaker 2: of podcaster, brash, annoying, know it all. But it was
Speaker 2: a new voice then, and it spoke to listeners for
Speaker 2: three hours a day, five days a week.
Speaker 7: So to give you just a bit of an idea
Speaker 7: about the show, there are no guests never. We don't
Speaker 7: talk about single issues or themes unless they evolve as
Speaker 7: the program goes. It is pretty much an open line
Speaker 7: discussion each and every day.
Speaker 2: Limba revolutionized radio open line. It was all him, even
Speaker 2: some of the ads. At a time when human resources
Speaker 2: departments were newly requiring sexual harassment training, Limbaugh spent a
Speaker 2: lot of his time on air attacking feminists, especially after
Speaker 2: Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Speaker 2: Limba made a fake ad about Feminazi trading cards. I'll
Speaker 2: give you two glorious nyems for an Anita Hell.
Speaker 1: Trading cards have always been for males only.
Speaker 9: It's just not fair, It's not right. Damn I spilt
Speaker 9: ill past my Betty freedan.
Speaker 1: Feminazi cards are designed with a woman in mind.
Speaker 2: I'll up front, I remember in those years my dad
Speaker 2: listening to Limba, who drove my mother nuts. I bet
Speaker 2: a lot of families had an experience like that. Limba.
Speaker 2: He'd say it seemed anything, so partly people tuned in
Speaker 2: for the thrill of it, to hear what he'd say next.
Speaker 2: For the rest of us, though, it was like getting
Speaker 2: kicked in the face every day. He went after feminists,
Speaker 2: He liked to mock environmentalists, gays and lesbians. He made
Speaker 2: a lot of jokes about aides. Despite or really because
Speaker 2: of all that, Limbo's audience just grew and grew. Mainly
Speaker 2: that audience was men, white men who were angry. As
Speaker 2: angry as Rush seemed to be real. Wages for white
Speaker 2: men who had gone to college were dropping. They're still dropping.
Speaker 2: Some of these guys really did have a lot to
Speaker 2: be angry about. Rush told them who to be angry at.
Speaker 2: The people who loved Rush. They called themselves dittoheads because
Speaker 2: they believed everything he said and would say it back ditto.
Speaker 2: Limbo's format, the wall of Talk pushed nearly everything else
Speaker 2: off talk radio, all the kooky chit chat and cooking
Speaker 2: shows and carpentry shows and community theater everything. Meanwhile, radio stations,
Speaker 2: which for a long time time had been mom and
Speaker 2: pop operations, were getting bought out by giant, consolidated, national,
Speaker 2: and even global corporations. Here I've got to disclose something
Speaker 2: about that consolidation. The Rush Limbaugh Show was eventually syndicated
Speaker 2: by an outfit called clear Channel. More recently, clear Channel
Speaker 2: rebranded itself as iHeart Media, and an arm of iHeart
Speaker 2: now sells ads for Pushkin Industries, which is the production
Speaker 2: house that makes the last Archive. So this is like
Speaker 2: when the Washington Post reports on Amazon and then has
Speaker 2: to mention that the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Okay,
Speaker 2: the last Archive is not the Washington Post, and iHeart
Speaker 2: doesn't own Pushkin. But still it's important to disclose these things.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh liked to present himself as a cowboy, a maverick, bold, reckless,
Speaker 2: and unpredictable. In reality, he was more like the Wonderbread
Speaker 2: of radio, the factory made whitebread of radio, who was
Speaker 2: the same every goddamn day, rant, rant, ad rant, rant,
Speaker 2: ad rant, rant, big rant, station break rant. What he
Speaker 2: was selling was his own predictability three hours a day,
Speaker 2: five days a week. But the forces that had to
Speaker 2: do with Limbaugh's success had to do with more than
Speaker 2: just radio formats. For years, Limbaugh's fortunes rose while other
Speaker 2: medias fell. Daily newspapers were going out of business. Limbaugh
Speaker 2: didn't seem to mind.
Speaker 7: If you listened to this show every day, you never
Speaker 7: need to read another newspaper again, never read on a magazine.
Speaker 7: I do it for you, and you get a bonus.
Speaker 7: I tell you what to think about this incredibly complicated
Speaker 7: and controversial issue.
Speaker 2: I tell you what to think. And he wasn't joking.
Speaker 2: Limba presented himself as a prophet liberals and Feminazis, they
Speaker 2: were heretics. Limba was talking politics, but his show was
Speaker 2: less like a news program than like those old radio
Speaker 2: gospel shows. Politics as preaching, listening as worship, conservatism as
Speaker 2: a new religion. Scholars call this called sectarianism, and in
Speaker 2: this era, sectarianism was headed to Washington.
Speaker 12: At gopack, our mission is to gain control of the
Speaker 12: US House of Representatives.
Speaker 13: We're developing a farm team of future congressional candidates.
Speaker 2: That's audio from what's known as a go Pack tape,
Speaker 2: one of the thousands of tapes made by a GOP
Speaker 2: political action committee that had become the mouthpiece for just
Speaker 2: one man.
Speaker 13: This is Congress and Nude Gingrich. As a candidate, you've
Speaker 13: probably been listening to tapes from gopack all year, and
Speaker 13: you know that we've emphasized certain basic ideas and certain
Speaker 13: basic approaches.
Speaker 2: Newt Gingrich, then a congressman from Georgia. Gingrich heard what
Speaker 2: Limbaugh was doing on air, and in the late nineteen
Speaker 2: eighties started to record his own version of that format
Speaker 2: through these go pack cassette tapes. If you were a
Speaker 2: Republican running for office or working on a campaign, you'd
Speaker 2: probably listen to these tapes in your car as cassette player.
Speaker 13: In this tape, we have a speech I gave to
Speaker 13: the Republicans in California. We decided to share with you
Speaker 13: as an example of how you can bring all the
Speaker 13: basic values together.
Speaker 2: This is the sound of modern political history, shifting gears
Speaker 2: and burning out the clutch. The tapes were mailed to
Speaker 2: thousands of people every month. One Republican from Minnesota told
Speaker 2: PBS's Frontline how crucial they were when.
Speaker 1: They would come.
Speaker 7: I mean, and you spent some time in a car,
Speaker 7: particularly going back and forth to the state legislature.
Speaker 9: When they would come in the mail.
Speaker 7: I mean I would open them up right away, and
Speaker 7: I would put them in a cassette player within twenty
Speaker 7: four hours.
Speaker 2: The purpose of the tapes was to create a single
Speaker 2: national message for a conservative insurgency, to make newt dittoheads.
Speaker 13: There are two movements in America. There's a left wing
Speaker 13: radical movement, and there's a common sense, practical, center right majority,
Speaker 13: the basic conservatives. Let me give you an example of
Speaker 13: how we think you can draw those lines.
Speaker 2: Gingrich proposed a set of dualisms for candidates to use
Speaker 2: in ads. You might think this kind of hyper polarized
Speaker 2: rhetoric is more recent, a product of social media, maybe,
Speaker 2: but you'd be wrong.
Speaker 13: We believe in locking up criminals, especially dangerous criminals, but
Speaker 13: allowing honest citizens stone guns. The radical left introduced to
Speaker 13: build a legalize sex with animals, but we oppose legal
Speaker 13: sex with animals. In fact, frankly, we oppose any kind
Speaker 13: of sex with animals.
Speaker 2: In the early nineteen nineties, and a memo sent out
Speaker 2: with the tapes, go Back supplied candidates with a vocabulary list.
Speaker 2: It suggested words to use to help define your campaign change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth.
Speaker 4: Moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, duty, fair, protect, confident, incentive,
Speaker 4: hard work, initiative, common sense.
Speaker 2: Go Peck also listed words to use to describe your
Speaker 2: political opponents, words like sick, pathetic, liberal.
Speaker 4: Lie, shallow, traders, sensationalists, in danger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threatened, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive, attitude, destructive, impose,
Speaker 4: self serving, greed, sheet steel, abuse of power, obsolete.
Speaker 2: This was political warfare on all fronts. Gingrich trained the officers,
Speaker 2: Limbaugh rallied the troops. Gingrich's political power grew, and so
Speaker 2: did Limbaugh's audience to round fifteen million listeners each week.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety one, Limba appeared on CBS's sixty Minutes.
Speaker 4: What are you trying to do with this show?
Speaker 7: I'm trying to attract the largest audience I can and
Speaker 7: hold it for as long as I can so that
Speaker 7: I can charge advertisers confiscatory advertiser rates. This is a business.
Speaker 11: You're in it for the money.
Speaker 7: Sure, of course, I'm doing a lot of this for money.
Speaker 2: That's Limbaugh earning points for being honest. It's also a tactic.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump would adopt honesty about loving money. Listeners adored it.
Speaker 2: For talk radio, the money came rolling in, and not
Speaker 2: just for Limbaugh. Between nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: an average of twenty new talk radio stations went into
Speaker 2: business every month. Their shows weren't all conservative, at least
Speaker 2: not at first, but soon station owners discovered that if
Speaker 2: they ran only conservative talk, they had more listeners.
Speaker 14: No sports, no back, no information for mindless shatter your station.
Speaker 4: Kay BBL Talk Radio on Alice Springfield's papered conservative and
Speaker 4: author of the well selling book Only Turkeys Have Left Wings,
Speaker 4: Ladies and Gentlemen.
Speaker 8: Birch Barlow.
Speaker 2: You know you're in the zeitgeist when you're satirized on
Speaker 2: the Simpsons.
Speaker 7: Good morning, fellow freedomlikers, Birch Barlow, the fourth branch of government,
Speaker 7: the fifty first State.
Speaker 2: The more famous Limbaugh got, the more worried observers got,
Speaker 2: especially about how he talked about talk, how he talked
Speaker 2: about the freedom of speech, how he talked about fairness itself.
Speaker 7: This is also a benevolent dictatorship. I am the dictator.
Speaker 7: There is no First Amendment here except for me.
Speaker 2: Well, right, the First Amendment only constrains the government, not
Speaker 2: a privately owned radio station. But for most of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century there'd been some rules in place, rules that
Speaker 2: date to a time when people understood just how dangerous
Speaker 2: radio could be if broadcasters became dictators. In the nineteen forties,
Speaker 2: a guy named Clifford Dirr got a job offer from
Speaker 2: President Roosevelt. Derr was a lawyer from Alabama. He's best
Speaker 2: known to history for something he did much later in
Speaker 2: the nineteen fifty when he and his wife bailed Rosa
Speaker 2: Parks out of jail. Anyway, in nineteen forty one, FDR
Speaker 2: appointed Dr to the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, and
Speaker 2: I said, what was that? The FCC is the federal
Speaker 2: agency that regulates who can get broadcast licenses to use
Speaker 2: the airwaves, which after all, belonged to the public.
Speaker 6: When I went on to the FCAC, I knew absolutely
Speaker 6: nothing about it. But at the time, we will monitor
Speaker 6: all the access broadcast.
Speaker 2: I did an episode earlier this season called The Inner Front.
Speaker 2: It talks about how the US government monitored Radio Berlin
Speaker 2: and Radio Tokyo. That was part of the FCC's job
Speaker 2: during the Second World War, but the content of those
Speaker 2: enemy broadcasts really changed how Durer and the FCC thought
Speaker 2: about the power of radio.
Speaker 6: My god, this is a terrific medium. The other can
Speaker 6: be magnificent. I can completely ruin you if you've got
Speaker 6: this thing in the wrong hands. So then Adam again
Speaker 6: to take a more place to look at an American broadcast.
Speaker 2: The FCC started enforcing some rules that were on the
Speaker 2: books but that have been mostly ignored, and Der's influence
Speaker 2: would lead to a new rule that would shape broadcasting
Speaker 2: for the next half century. In nineteen forty nine, the
Speaker 2: FCC established what became known as the Fairness doctrine.
Speaker 9: Under the American system of broadcasting, the individual licensees of
Speaker 9: radio stations have the responsibility for determining the specific program
Speaker 9: material to be broadcast over their stations.
Speaker 2: So you could broadcast whatever you wanted.
Speaker 9: Except This choice, however, must be exercised in a manner
Speaker 9: consistent with the basic policy of the Congress that radio
Speaker 9: be maintained as a medium of free speech for the
Speaker 9: general public as a whole, rather than as an outlet
Speaker 9: for the purely personal or private interests of the licensee.
Speaker 2: The fairness doctrine is about the public interest. It says
Speaker 2: the government has an interest in what radio is dinations broadcast.
Speaker 2: It says that on the issues of the day, radio
Speaker 2: stations have to broadcast more than one view.
Speaker 9: This requires that licensees devote a reasonable percentage of their
Speaker 9: broadcast time to the discussion of public issues of interest
Speaker 9: in the community served by their stations, and that such
Speaker 9: programs be designed so that the public has a reasonable
Speaker 9: opportunity to hear different opposition positions.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties, the fairness doctrine was strengthened by
Speaker 2: way of congressional action, and the Johnson administration added a
Speaker 2: guarantee for a right of reply after a criticism during
Speaker 2: a broadcast. It wasn't often enforced, but it did happen sometimes,
Speaker 2: like when Medgar Evers once got seventeen minutes of airtime
Speaker 2: to respond to criticism of the NAACP, or once when
Speaker 2: conservatives attacked Kennedy's proposed nuclear test ban treaty, stations were
Speaker 2: required to play a pro test ban speech by the
Speaker 2: president himself. This was exact bactly the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that ticked conservatives off. Rules that required listeners to hear
Speaker 2: more from Edgar Evers hear more from President Kennedy.
Speaker 6: All mankind has been struggling to escape from the dockning
Speaker 6: prospect of mash destruction on Earth.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, the Supreme Court affirmed much of
Speaker 2: the Fairness Doctrine, but conservatives are getting more and more
Speaker 2: peeved about it, believing that the Fairness Doctrine suppressed conservative views.
Speaker 2: By the nineteen eighties, they really wanted to get rid
Speaker 2: of it, and it was vulnerable because it was a regulation,
Speaker 2: not a law. In nineteen eighty five, a new FCC
Speaker 2: head appointed by President Reagan said he would fight to
Speaker 2: end the Fairness Doctrine. Two years later, in a bipartisan vote,
Speaker 2: Congress passed a bill that would have established the doctrine
Speaker 2: as law, but Reagan vetoed it and Congress didn't have
Speaker 2: the votes to override his veto. The doctrine was.
Speaker 9: Dead, and now here's Russe Limbaugh.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh could not have operated if the Fairness Doctrine had
Speaker 2: still been in place, at least not without worrying that
Speaker 2: the FCC might come after him because he used his
Speaker 2: airtime to promote partisanship. In fact, he was more than
Speaker 2: a partisan. Limbaugh wanted to be a king Maker. In
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two, after his preferred candidate, Pat Buchanan failed
Speaker 2: to win the nomination, Limbaugh stumped for George Bush, Senior.
Speaker 2: But when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Limbaugh sounded a
Speaker 2: battle cry. He made it his mission to take down
Speaker 2: the Clintons, both of them.
Speaker 7: The Clintons are running around on this national tour. Now,
Speaker 7: you know, I don't know how else to say this.
Speaker 7: I mean, the president gets away when he says something
Speaker 7: it isn't true later being told about, Oh yeah, I
Speaker 7: was an inadvertent statement. The motto of this administration every
Speaker 7: day is what can we do to fool him? Today?
Speaker 2: Bill Clinton, for sure did sometimes lie, no question, but
Speaker 2: fooling people was not the motto of his administration. Clinton
Speaker 2: got exasperated. You can hear him on Saint Louis AM
Speaker 2: Radio practically begging for a rite of reply.
Speaker 5: After I get off the radio today with you, Rush Limbaugh,
Speaker 5: I'll have three hours to say whatever he wants, and
Speaker 5: I won't have any opportunity to respond. And there's no
Speaker 5: truth detector. You won't get on afterwards and say what
Speaker 5: was true and what was.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety three, Democrats in Congress tried to bring
Speaker 2: back the fairness doctrine. Limbaugh like to call their effort
Speaker 2: the hush rush Bill, but other people on talk radio
Speaker 2: didn't see.
Speaker 5: It that way.
Speaker 12: I'm a proponent of the fairness doctrine.
Speaker 2: That's longtime radio and television host Larry King in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three.
Speaker 5: I like it.
Speaker 12: I like the fact that we as broadcasters have to
Speaker 12: be fair. It is not out to get any broadcast.
Speaker 12: I know Rush Limbaugh thinks they're out to get them.
Speaker 12: All it means is that a station who has if
Speaker 12: you have eight right wing hosts, you better put some
Speaker 12: left wing hosts on.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's wrong with that.
Speaker 2: But the fairness doctrine was not reinstated, and in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, in the midterm elections, Republicans flipped the Senate
Speaker 2: and the House. It was a wipeout. They took ten governorships,
Speaker 2: they won state legislatures if they elected Newt Gingrich Speaker
Speaker 2: of the House. The freshman Republicans in the House named
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class, and he
Speaker 2: went to Capitol Hill where he was besieged by reporters
Speaker 2: asking him how talk radio had led the Conservatives to victory.
Speaker 7: These reporters who asked me questions about talk radio were
Speaker 7: all trying to say, in a roundabout way, that I
Speaker 7: took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to
Speaker 7: mind numbed robots, and every day would send out code
Speaker 7: in my show that would force them to march to
Speaker 7: the polls on November the eighth of the poll the
Speaker 7: lever I wanted them to poll.
Speaker 2: Listening to Limbaugh's speech to the freshman Republican members of
Speaker 2: the House, you can hear them giggling as Limbaugh turned
Speaker 2: to a new topic, reports of secret meetings that Built
Speaker 2: and Hillary Clinton were holding in the White House about me.
Speaker 7: They're trying to come up with a liberal version of me.
Speaker 8: They're scouring America looking for some liberal.
Speaker 7: Host who can automatically end up on six hundred and
Speaker 7: sixty radio stations.
Speaker 5: They think that they can.
Speaker 7: Just pluck some liberal out of the sky and put
Speaker 7: him on the radio and create a bunch of liberal
Speaker 7: mind numb robots.
Speaker 2: Point taken Limbo's listeners, any listeners weren't mind numb robots.
Speaker 2: But remember he asked his listeners to surrender to his
Speaker 2: point of view, and millions of them did just that
Speaker 2: you might not like the fairness doctrine. You might want
Speaker 2: some other sort of guidelines or mechanisms in place, you
Speaker 2: might want none at all. But whatever your view, you
Speaker 2: still got to wrestle with this fact. A democracy can't
Speaker 2: really work if people only listen to one kind of
Speaker 2: political opinion all day, every day. Limbo was right about
Speaker 2: one thing, though, in this era with the fairness doctrine dead,
Speaker 2: some people really were looking for a liberal version of him,
Speaker 2: not someone who would hush Rush, someone who would crush Rush.
Speaker 15: Hen you welcome me out, Franken, show, I'm out, Franken.
Speaker 2: The left answer to Rush Limba would be for a while,
Speaker 2: this guy, Alan Stuart Franken, a comedian best known at
Speaker 2: the time for his work on Saturday Night Live. Franken
Speaker 2: had written a book called Rush Limbo Is a Big,
Speaker 2: Fat Idiot and Other Observations. He came out in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety six. The audiobook version gives you an idea of
Speaker 2: Franken's vibe at the time.
Speaker 3: I thought the title, aside from the obvious advantage of
Speaker 3: being personally offensive to Limbaugh, would sell books. Let me
Speaker 3: explain why it makes fun of Rush Limbaugh by pointing
Speaker 3: out that he's a big lard butt.
Speaker 2: Franken told c SPAN he wanted to be Limbaugh's kryptonite.
Speaker 10: If Rush Limbaugh were to write a book about you,
Speaker 10: what would its title be?
Speaker 3: Uh, The guy who got me, the guy who held
Speaker 3: me accountable, the guy who my ass.
Speaker 2: Franken owned his comedy style deadpan, a bit obnoxious, part
Speaker 2: smart alec, part frat boy. Here he is talking to
Speaker 2: an audience of college students.
Speaker 3: What I do is in propaganda.
Speaker 16: What I do is taking what they say and using
Speaker 16: it against them.
Speaker 3: What I do is jiu jitsu.
Speaker 16: They say something ridiculous and then I subject them to
Speaker 16: scorn and ridicule.
Speaker 1: That's my job.
Speaker 2: Franken had a lot in common with Limbaugh. They were
Speaker 2: both born in nineteen fifty one. They're both from the
Speaker 2: middle of the country. Limba's from Missouri, Franken grew up
Speaker 2: in Minnesota. They both love to perform. Then there are
Speaker 2: the differences. Limbaugh dropped out of college, Franken graduated from Harvard.
Speaker 2: The same year that Franken published Rush Limbaugh as a
Speaker 2: Big fat Idiot, a new cable television network started up,
Speaker 2: Fox News. Its motto was fair and balanced. This was
Speaker 2: the cable TV version of stuff that Limbaugh and Gingrich
Speaker 2: had pioneered. Really, you can put everything on early Fox
Speaker 2: News into one of two bins that first labeled Limbaugh,
Speaker 2: the second labeled Gingridge. The courser stuff Limba, the more
Speaker 2: professory stuff Gingridge. But it was all the same in
Speaker 2: the end, lots of opinion monologues getting viewers to distrust
Speaker 2: other sources of information, rewriting American history. Meanwhile, talk radio
Speaker 2: was getting harsher, meaner, more vulgar. Limba did a lot
Speaker 2: of schoolyard name calling. He called MSNBC PMSNBC. He called
Speaker 2: US News and World Report, US News, Meet the Press,
Speaker 2: meet the depressed. Things got darker in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 2: when the Monica Lewinsky scandal drove ratings through the roof,
Speaker 2: both for Fox News and for Talk radio.
Speaker 9: Bill Clinton got call Stumpen.
Speaker 11: Legan turn Monica Lewinsky the blue stain dress.
Speaker 2: All this time, and especially after nine to eleven, a
Speaker 2: lot of liberals were still wishing there was a liberal Limbaugh,
Speaker 2: so they started a new radio network called Air America.
Speaker 2: Air America would launch all kinds of careers, including Rachel
Speaker 2: Maddows before joining MSNBC. She had her own Air America show. Now,
Speaker 2: Franken came to Air America from the USO. He'd been
Speaker 2: going on tours entertaining the troops overseas Bob Hopestyle. He
Speaker 2: saw that work as a chance to show that right
Speaker 2: wingers didn't have a monopoly on patriotism. Franken, like all
Speaker 2: of Air America, had the idea that left wing radio
Speaker 2: would offer listeners the opposition positions that the fairness doctrine
Speaker 2: would have required if it had still been in place,
Speaker 2: though he didn't put it in such lofty terms.
Speaker 15: It's about.
Speaker 16: Answering these fuckheads that have been on the air and
Speaker 16: lion and delivering this simplistic, black and white babble about
Speaker 16: how the world works, as if they know something, and
Speaker 16: they have built this infrastructure of feeding people misinformation about
Speaker 16: economic justice and about how our society is run. And
Speaker 16: it's about time that somebody fought back.
Speaker 17: Talk to me, talk about the right wing.
Speaker 3: Dis honesty.
Speaker 2: Franklin launched his own Air America radio show in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four. He delivered something surprising, an old fashioned
Speaker 2: variety show sort of Marx Brothers but about politics with
Speaker 2: lots of skits.
Speaker 17: Show is brought to you by the Union of Jewish Archaeologists.
Speaker 1: We look at fossils of arightly Man and asked, was.
Speaker 8: This a Jew?
Speaker 2: What else Franken was doing was different from anything else
Speaker 2: on the air, mostly though it was different from the
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh Show. Everything about Franken Show was designed in
Speaker 2: opposition to Limbaugh's show. Unlike Limbaugh, who only had guests occasionally,
Speaker 2: Franken Show featured them, and unlike Limbaugh, Franken invited calls
Speaker 2: from people who disagreed with him. When Franken did monologues,
Speaker 2: he often got serious.
Speaker 17: In the early sixties, We'd watch TV. We watched the news,
Speaker 17: maryor TV trays in there, watched the news. We'd see
Speaker 17: southern sheriff's sicken police dogs on black demonstrators.
Speaker 14: Made that so that no Jew can be for that.
Speaker 2: The most important part of Franken Show came when he
Speaker 2: fact checked the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Speaker 17: How many people listened to him Fifteen to twenty million, right, right, Okay,
Speaker 17: so those people believe him, right, yeah, Okay, so most
Speaker 17: of his listeners believe is seventy five percent people making
Speaker 17: minimum wage are teenagers in their first job. I had
Speaker 17: our staff look at up sixty one point one percent
Speaker 17: of people earning minimum wage are twenty or over. You know,
Speaker 17: we got our statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Speaker 17: and he got it from the Bureau of Limbaugh's butt.
Speaker 2: Frankn put on a good show, but Air America turned
Speaker 2: out to be a disaster. The company was underfunded, badly run,
Speaker 2: beset by financial mismanagement and scandal. Also, the audience for
Speaker 2: Al Franken's show never got above a million and a
Speaker 2: half weekly listeners, just a tiny fraction of the audience
Speaker 2: of the Rush Limbaugh Show. There are lots of theories
Speaker 2: about why left wing radio failed. One of them is
Speaker 2: that liberals would rather listen to something more thoughtful and
Speaker 2: temperate like NPR. But then again, liberals flocked to Comedy Central,
Speaker 2: where John Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Rupport were
Speaker 2: very much in the mold of Air America. So I
Speaker 2: tend to think the was the company. Franken jumped ship
Speaker 2: before the ship sank. In two thousand and seven, he
Speaker 2: went off the air and announced his run for a
Speaker 2: Senate seat from Minnesota. Two thousand and eight was a
Speaker 2: wild election year. Barack Obama was seeking the Democratic nomination,
Speaker 2: and after he defeated Hillary Clinton, he made his historic
Speaker 2: bid for the presidency. Rush Limbaugh turned the fire hose
Speaker 2: of his fury from the Clintons to the Obamas. He
Speaker 2: played on air a song called Barack the Magic Negro.
Speaker 2: Obama decided to let that pass, which is likely why
Speaker 2: you've never heard of it. Obama won in something close
Speaker 2: to a landslide, and Al Franken became the new Senator
Speaker 2: from Minnesota. In office, Franken's comedic personality evaporated. He was
Speaker 2: mostly known for being pretty reasonable, quiet, and hard working.
Speaker 15: In addition to providing some budgetary certainty for the next
Speaker 15: two years, the budget deal on the some of the
Speaker 15: extreme across the board cuts of the sequester that will
Speaker 15: enable us to make more.
Speaker 2: In twenty fourteen, Franken won reelection to the Senate. He
Speaker 2: was sort of a non story. Meanwhile, rush Limbaugh's tirades
Speaker 2: grew louder and louder all through Obama's two terms in office.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh urged obstructionism, the rejection of all compromise. Thank you.
Speaker 7: Let's say, as conservatives, liberals demand that we be bipartisan
Speaker 7: with them in Congress. What they mean is we check
Speaker 7: our core principles at the door. Come and let them
Speaker 7: run the show, and then agree with them. That's my
Speaker 7: partnership to them.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've got to stop the tape. I am so
Speaker 2: sick of this. Hel Franken, when he was writing that
Speaker 2: book about Limbaugh, said it took a real toll on
Speaker 2: him to have to listen to this guy all the time.
Speaker 2: I feel that it's like reading hate mail. To be honest,
Speaker 2: I find listening to Al Franken pretty grading too. But
Speaker 2: when you're researching historical development, you don't choose the evidence
Speaker 2: you enjoy. Your job is to listen to all of it.
Speaker 7: To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with
Speaker 7: us after we have politically cleaned their clocks and beaten them.
Speaker 1: And that has to be what you're focused on.
Speaker 2: In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton was running for president against
Speaker 2: a new.
Speaker 8: Opponent, politicians are all talk.
Speaker 6: And no action.
Speaker 2: That year, Al Franken spoke at the Democratic Convention, still
Speaker 2: fighting the far right.
Speaker 18: I'm Al frankan Minnesota senator and world renowned expert on
Speaker 18: right wing megalomaniacs, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and now Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: And that was the right genealogy, Limbaugh made Trump possible.
Speaker 2: Trump's whole I alone can fix it. Thing that was
Speaker 2: straight Limbaugh. The style of followership that Limbaugh cultivated, those
Speaker 2: dittoheads that became trump Ism, those schoolyard insults straight Limbaugh.
Speaker 2: All this led the political outsider Trump to an unexpected victory.
Speaker 2: But long after Trump won, Limbaugh remained fixated on the
Speaker 2: outgoing president.
Speaker 11: The first moment that Trump does anything that is the
Speaker 11: unraveling of an Obama agenda item.
Speaker 1: Obama's going to be on TV. Hey, you know what,
Speaker 1: I won't go on TV.
Speaker 11: I'm glad you'd exclue.
Speaker 10: TMP about destroy Obama.
Speaker 14: Ker.
Speaker 2: I find Limbaugh's prediction super revealing because of how wrong
Speaker 2: it was, Because, of course, Obama did not go on
Speaker 2: television and damn Trump's every move. Instead, Obama kept quiet
Speaker 2: for pretty much all four years of Trump's administration. Obama
Speaker 2: played by old school rules. The ex president steps out
Speaker 2: of politics, the rules that every other American president of
Speaker 2: whatever party had played by from the beginning. Limba, though,
Speaker 2: seemed no longer able to imagine that anyone still played
Speaker 2: by rules. Twenty first century political warfare is a battle
Speaker 2: for truth. People like to say, but more and more.
Speaker 2: I think it has been a battle about doubt. Believe
Speaker 2: only me, doubt everyone else. Rush Limbaugh said he was
Speaker 2: the voice of America. L Franken tried to fact check him.
Speaker 2: Then Donald Trump said he was the voice of America,
Speaker 2: and then all hell broke loose.
Speaker 1: I can do anything whatever you want, grab them by them,
Speaker 1: I can do any of them.
Speaker 2: After the Access Hollywood tape came out just before the
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen election, Trump said it was just locker room talk.
Speaker 16: I've been in a lot of locker rooms.
Speaker 2: That's Al Franken on Late Night with Seth Myers.
Speaker 16: I you know, I belong with a health club OA
Speaker 16: in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: I think you can tell.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we can tell.
Speaker 14: And our locker room banter is stuff like is Trump crazy?
Speaker 2: In the end, though, one politician who would be brought
Speaker 2: down for trump sins would be Al Franken. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: a conservative talk radio host named Leeann Tweeden went on
Speaker 2: the air at KABC in Los Angeles with a bombshell.
Speaker 9: Who is your abuser?
Speaker 19: Senator Al Franken. It was in two thousand and six
Speaker 19: we were going on a USO tour. He gave me
Speaker 19: the script, and you know, it was full of sexual
Speaker 19: innu windows and it was supposed to be funny, you know.
Speaker 2: Tweeden told the story of how back in two thousand
Speaker 2: and six, she and Franken had been together in Kuwait,
Speaker 2: backstage at a USO tour, rehearsing for the show.
Speaker 19: And he mashes his mouth up against mine and he
Speaker 19: sticks his tongue in my mouth. And as it happens,
Speaker 19: it happens so fast, and he puts his tongue in
Speaker 19: my mouth and his mouth is just wet and slimy.
Speaker 19: I was violated. I was disgusted. That's not what I
Speaker 19: was expecting. All I could think about was that's what
Speaker 19: you wrote that in the script for, so you could
Speaker 19: do that to me.
Speaker 2: Also, there was a cringey photo.
Speaker 14: A photo has surfaced today showing Tweeting asleep on the
Speaker 14: flight back home, and it reveals Franken groping her.
Speaker 2: Franken apologized sort of vaguely, but then seven other women
Speaker 2: made accusations against him, mostly about unwanted touching. Pressured by
Speaker 2: his Democratic Senate colleagues, Franken resigned. His speech on the
Speaker 2: Senate floor was.
Speaker 14: Bitter, I of all people am aware that there is
Speaker 14: some irony in the fact that I am leaving while
Speaker 14: a man who has bragged on tape about his history
Speaker 14: of sexual assault sits in the Ovoil office.
Speaker 2: When the New Yorkers Jane Mayer reinvestigated the case, Franken
Speaker 2: told her that he regretted resigning. Seven current and former
Speaker 2: senators who urged him to resign said they regretted it too.
Speaker 2: As Mayor told NPR, there were holes in Tweeden's story.
Speaker 10: She had never been subjected to any fact checking. She
Speaker 10: had never produced any corroborators. And I spoke to eight
Speaker 10: people on that USO tour who had no political agenda,
Speaker 10: and most of them were in the military, and they
Speaker 10: were right there and they just didn't she is voice
Speaker 10: she saw it.
Speaker 2: As Mayor pointed out, Leanne Tweeden claimed, Franken wrote the
Speaker 2: controversial skit in two thousand and six for her, but
Speaker 2: in fact, and this is indisputable, he wrote it in
Speaker 2: two thousand and three. Other actresses had played that same role,
Speaker 2: but something else was lost in the frenzy around Tweeden's allegations.
Speaker 2: Her employer, KABC is a conservative talk radio station. Tweeden
Speaker 2: is a radio personality in the style of Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 2: and KABC did not reach out to get a comment
Speaker 2: from al Franken about Tweeden's accusations before airing them because
Speaker 2: a right to reply that was a rule that dated
Speaker 2: to the forgotten era of the fairness doctrine. I'm not
Speaker 2: saying al Franken is the hero of this story. He's not,
Speaker 2: but he isn't the villain either. Hyper Polarized politics will
Speaker 2: always tend to dualism, good versus evil. The error of
Speaker 2: the left is that it keeps joining this game of
Speaker 2: mayhem instead of restoring the rules. In February of twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: during his State of the Union address, Donald Trump awarded
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal
Speaker 2: of Freedom.
Speaker 8: Here tonight is a special man, be loved by millions
Speaker 8: of Americans who just received a Stage four advanced cancer diagnosis.
Speaker 8: This is not good news. But what is good news
Speaker 8: is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that
Speaker 8: you will ever meet.
Speaker 2: Limbaugh was dying of lung cancer. Al Franken was wandering
Speaker 2: in the political wilderness all that year. Trump and Limbaugh
Speaker 2: kept saying that Democrats were going to steal the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty election. But stealing elections was a go peck golden oldie,
Speaker 2: the two nut Gingrich had played back in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 13: They're going to buy a registration, they're going to buy votes,
Speaker 13: they're going to turn out votes, They're going to steal votes.
Speaker 13: They're going to do anything they can.
Speaker 2: Now you have to understand that, stop the steal, Gingrich
Speaker 2: said in nineteen eighty eight, and by twenty twenty he
Speaker 2: was saying it all over again. Two days after the.
Speaker 13: Election, you know, one's to be of any doubt. You
Speaker 13: are watching an effort to steal the presidency, and I says.
Speaker 2: Joe Biden won, but Donald Trump refused to concede. Then
Speaker 2: two months later, on January sixth, the next episode of
Speaker 2: the Last Archive, I'll go paddling down the many ruvers
Speaker 2: of doubt that dumped us into the sea of political catastrophe,
Speaker 2: the day when supporters of a defeated president rioted inside
Speaker 2: the nation's capital. But for now, I'll just say this.
Speaker 2: Against the backdrop of murder and mayhem, some pillars of
Speaker 2: right wing media began to crumble. A corporation that owns
Speaker 2: talk radio stations across the country ordered its hosts to
Speaker 2: stop saying the election was stolen and told them instead
Speaker 2: to induce national calm. Now, Rush Limbaugh, though he was
Speaker 2: having none of it.
Speaker 11: There's a lot of people calling for the end of violence.
Speaker 11: There's a lot of conservatives social media who say that
Speaker 11: any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable, regardless of
Speaker 11: the circumstances. I'm glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual
Speaker 11: Tea Party guys the minute Lexington and Conquered didn't feel
Speaker 11: that way.
Speaker 2: Rush Limbaugh died six weeks after that broadcast. The King
Speaker 2: of a m Radio left behind in America more bewildered
Speaker 2: and angry than ever, the nation split by a growing
Speaker 2: canyon of talk with no bridges of meaning. That canyon
Speaker 2: looked like it might just swallow up the oldest democracy
Speaker 2: in the world. The Last Archive is written and hosted
Speaker 2: by me Joe Lapour. It's produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon
Speaker 2: and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton
Speaker 2: and our executive producer is Mielbel. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer.
Speaker 2: Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi
Speaker 2: and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonett. Our research assistants are
Speaker 2: Camanie Panthea and Lily Richmond. Our fool proof players Arioshia Mao,
Speaker 2: Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bossy, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschelfeld, Becca A. Lewis,
Speaker 2: Andrew Perella, Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton Sosia. Thanks to
Speaker 2: Brian Rosenwald for his book Talk Radios America. We couldn't
Speaker 2: have written this episode without it, and thanks to Simon Leek.
Speaker 2: The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At
Speaker 2: Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fain, John Schnarz, Carlin Migliori,
Speaker 2: Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rosstak, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kinnig,
Speaker 2: and Daniella Lacan. Many of our art effects are from
Speaker 2: Harry Jeanett Junior and the Star Jeannette Foundation. If you
Speaker 2: like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.
Speaker 2: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill
Speaker 2: Obour