Limbaugh claims shooter was "liberal"
Ah, the Limbaugh, utterly without class. From Media Matters:
(Yes, let's hear all those defenses, station managers and corporate bean counters -- it's our job, you don't understand radio, it's what people are thinking, blah blah blah. No, station managers and corporate bean counters, these are the public airwaves and you are personally complicit in polluting them with filth. You are not acting in the public interest, and since you obviously can't restore your own house it is likely that someday the Congress will have to do it for you. And spare me the "First Amendment" defense, you don't have a First Amendment right to use public property to make money.)
It's an absurd thing to ascribe a political point of view to a senseless act of violence committed by someone who was obviously deranged. One could just as easily claim Cho was a conservative because he had a problem with women, and that wouldn't make any more sense than what Limbaugh said.
There's a huge outcry right now against NBC for distributing Cho's multi-media diatribe. And NBC certainly deserves some criticism for at least appearing to hold an exclusive story that was the direct result of mass murder. They could have turned the material over to the FBI and waited until the FBI released the material to all media, but there you had Brian Williams one night promoting the material for the next morning on the "Today" program. No wonder people are "mad as hell and not going to take it any more."
That being said, without a further examination of how the media operates in this country, we will get nowhere. Sure, it's a competitive business, but the competition resulted long ago in a race to the bottom. While NBC did the right thing in taking Don Imus off its air, it only took a decade.
Are we at a moment of great change in the US corporate media, at long last? Perhaps, but ordinary citizens need to express their disgust to elected officials and keep the pressure on. We can't have a real democracy with a broken media.
On the April 19 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh declared that the perpetrator of the April 16 Virginia Tech shootings "had to be a liberal," adding: "You start railing against the rich, and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act." Limbaugh then complained, in a possible reference to Media Matters for America, that "Now the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation." Limbaugh regularly describes mainstream media sources as "the drive-by media."The fact that Limbaugh knows blogs and others will point out his excesses kind of proves he knows that he is wrong. He's not an idiot; he knows what he is doing, which makes it all the more heinous. And most distubringly, radio station program managers must know by now what Limbaugh says, and they put it on the air anyway because they can make money doing it. These individuals are personally complicit in spreading hate in return for a dollar.
(Yes, let's hear all those defenses, station managers and corporate bean counters -- it's our job, you don't understand radio, it's what people are thinking, blah blah blah. No, station managers and corporate bean counters, these are the public airwaves and you are personally complicit in polluting them with filth. You are not acting in the public interest, and since you obviously can't restore your own house it is likely that someday the Congress will have to do it for you. And spare me the "First Amendment" defense, you don't have a First Amendment right to use public property to make money.)
It's an absurd thing to ascribe a political point of view to a senseless act of violence committed by someone who was obviously deranged. One could just as easily claim Cho was a conservative because he had a problem with women, and that wouldn't make any more sense than what Limbaugh said.
There's a huge outcry right now against NBC for distributing Cho's multi-media diatribe. And NBC certainly deserves some criticism for at least appearing to hold an exclusive story that was the direct result of mass murder. They could have turned the material over to the FBI and waited until the FBI released the material to all media, but there you had Brian Williams one night promoting the material for the next morning on the "Today" program. No wonder people are "mad as hell and not going to take it any more."
That being said, without a further examination of how the media operates in this country, we will get nowhere. Sure, it's a competitive business, but the competition resulted long ago in a race to the bottom. While NBC did the right thing in taking Don Imus off its air, it only took a decade.
Are we at a moment of great change in the US corporate media, at long last? Perhaps, but ordinary citizens need to express their disgust to elected officials and keep the pressure on. We can't have a real democracy with a broken media.
