Limbaugh tips scale of discontent - talk radio host Rush Limbaugh - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 28, 1994 | by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

The name Rush Limbaugh has become very controversial in some august quarters of the republic. One might well wonder why. He has the largest radio talk show audience in American history, and by a lot. He has published two best-sellers. He has a nightly television show with ratings that compete in some markets with such esteemed American institutions as The Tonight Show.

Well, the immediate source of controversy is that something called the Florida Citrus Commission has bought a million dollars of ad space on Limbaugh's radio show. It is part of the commission's $17 million promotional budget. Larry King gets $500,000, but his show is much smaller than Rush Limbaugh's.

King seems to have no critics aside from that handful of us who reproach him for the vulgarity of his language and the coarseness of his thought. Limbaugh, despite his huge popularity, has many critics, and they go beyond criticizing his style to abominating his substance. They want the Citrus Commission to withdraw its ads. They are threatening a boycott.

Some years ago when Vietnam veterans threatened to boycott Jane Fonda's movies, liberals were shocked by the intolerance. Today there are few liberals coming to Rush Limbaugh's defense, but then today there are really very few liberals left.

Liberalism has become a sham. Once it was a political point of view favoring tolerance, free expression, equality and a sunny view of human nature. Today it has broken down into vested interests, frequently contradictory and all dominated by charlatans: career feminists, career environmentalists, career homosexuals and so forth. These are people who would be out of work if they could not con credulous followers into joining them in some fanciful complaint: an insufficient number of ladies' rooms at the ballpark, a schoolgirl being barred from the high school sumo wrestling team, mistreatment of a favored swamp. Protest has become an American way of life, but only one kind of protest is socially acceptable by those who decide such things.

Those who decide such things are, of course, the sham liberals. Now they are in a fury over Limbaugh. He disagrees with them on just about everything. America's sham liberals are uneasy with those who disagree with them. Perhaps this is because they recognize how easily their essential phoniness might be exposed if there was, in our media and in our wider culture, a balance of forces.

Well, Limbaugh's success may suggest that a balance in our media may be on the way. The audience that tunes into Limbaugh subscribes to conservative magazines in such numbers that those magazines are the largest ideological reviews in the country. National Review and the American Spectator each have more than 100,000 subscribers than their nearest competitors on the left.

Surely the media titans who run newspapers and broadcast media must recognize that there is a large population of Americans yearning for Limbaugh's conservatism. In Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom there is a two-party media. Only here does sham liberalism operate a cultural monopoly. That cannot last.

Whether the fabulous Florida Citrus Commission continues to advertise its product in the country's largest talk show market, I cannot say. Certainly Limbaugh's 20 million -- America's middle class, for the most part -- are not likely to take the commission's abandonment meekly. From all I can tell, they believe that their political opinions are worthy of respect. And they are. They pay taxes, abide by the law and have no particular axes to grind. It is just that they disagree with all the career malcontents of illiberal liberalism.

The true zealots and voices of hate in the land are those who would ban advertisers from the Rush Limbaugh's show or from any other show.