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A critical assessment of the conservative political radio host's ideologies demonstrates how Limbaugh's controversial stances on race and other civil issues are dangerously influencing politics today. Simutlaneous.
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John K. Wilson is the author of five previous books, including Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, and Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies. He is the editor of Illinois Academe, the newspaper of the Illinois conference of the American Association of University Professors. A former student of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, he is an Illinois native who currently lives in Chicago.
1
RUSH LIMBAUGH’S RACISM
WHEN RUSH LIMBAUGH TRIED to buy a share of the St. Louis Rams in 2009, it sparked a national debate about race that went far beyond the football field. Several NFL players, including Mathias Kiwanuka, Bart Scott, and Donovan McNabb, announced publicly that they would not play for a team owned by Limbaugh.1
But the discussion of Limbaugh’s racism was quickly diverted by two fake quotes that had been attributed to the radio host around the Internet. In one, Limbaugh was falsely accused of saying, “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over one hundred years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” The other fake quote declared: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.” These quotes were apparently put up on Wikiquote in 2005 and then spread around the Internet by someone using the nickname Cobra.2 The fake quotes about Limbaugh were repeated by Rachel Maddow, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, Tamron Hall, CNN’s Rick Sanchez, MSNBC’s David Shuster, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell, AlterNet’s Rory O’Connor, The Nation’s Dave Zirin, and many others.3
Rush rightly denounced “these slanderous, made-up, fabricated quotes found in a sewer on the Internet.”4 But Limbaugh wasn’t upset by these fake quotes; he was thrilled to draw attention away from all of his real racist quotes that he can’t deny. And the critics of Limbaugh had no sure way of knowing that the quotes had been faked, since he had never denied them. Limbaugh said, “Whatever happened to journalists calling people and saying, ‘Did you actually say this? I’m doing a story on blah, blah, blah. Did you actually say this?’”5 But when I sent the radio host an email asking if the quotes were real, he never responded to me.6
Bill O’Reilly declared: “The reason that Limbaugh is not going to be able to buy into the NFL is because a bunch of made-up stuff became legend. And he got hammered.... So what we have here are accusations without merit. But in our hypermedia age, that’s enough to paint someone as a racist.”7 However, the fake quotes had nothing to do with Rush being dropped from the bid; to the contrary, the quotes undermined the critics of Limbaugh by discrediting those who used them.
Limbaugh, like anyone else, should be free to buy a football team. But it is the NFL owners who restrict team ownership. It wasn’t liberal bias that caused his friends to drop him from their bid; he claimed the organizer of the bid, Dave Checketts, told him he “cleared [his] involvement with people at the highest levels of the National Football League.”8 As Dave Zirin noted, “This has nothing to do with Limbaugh’s conservative politics. Most NFL owners are to the right of Dick Cheney. Over twenty years, officials on twenty-three of the thirty-two NFL clubs have donated more money to Republicans than Democrats.”9 It was the corporate bias of the NFL, which feared the consequences of having a controversial figure owning a team, that led to him being dumped.
RACE AND THE BLACK QUARTERBACK
The statement that caused the most controversy for Limbaugh’s NFL bid came during his short-lived stint as a commentator on ESPN in 2003 when he said about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb: “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well.”10 Plenty of people have criticized prominent athletes or alleged that they’re overrated. But Rush did something very different by claiming that a black athlete was overrated because all of these white sports journalists love black people so much.
The radio host claimed, “All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something. If I wasn’t right, there wouldn’t be the cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sportswriter community.”11 This is a standard technique Limbaugh offers against all criticism. Whenever he says something outrageous, he then claims that there wouldn’t be any outrage if it were untrue.
But it wasn’t true. As Thomas George reported in The New York Times, “Among the black quarterbacks and the three black head coaches on the thirty-two NFL teams, there is a definitive feeling that they are on shorter leashes than their white counterparts.”12 FOX Sports cohost James Brown said: “In my eighteen years covering the NFL, I have not seen any of my media colleagues coddling McNabb or any other black quarterback. Just ask Kordell Stewart. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”13 A scientific study of more than ten thousand sports articles found “no support to Limbaugh’s position” that black quarterbacks were treated better by the media.14 Yet Limbaugh never apologized and never retracted his claims. He said about McNabb in 2009, “I said exactly what I meant, and if you want me to, I’ll say it again.”15
Rush Limbaugh’s harsh attacks on a black quarterback and accusations of media bias stand in sharp contrast to how he dealt with a white quarterback. Limbaugh came to the defense of white Chicago Bears quarterback Rex Grossman after media commentators criticized his performance in the 2007 Super Bowl: “They’re just all over this guy. They can’t wait for this guy to fail. They are hoping he fails.”16 While he may be an expert at hoping for failure, Limbaugh certainly isn’t one at media analysis: “The media, the sports media, has got social concerns that they are first and foremost interested in, and they’re dumping on this guy, Rex Grossman, for one reason, folks, and that’s because he is a white quarterback.”17 (Obviously, the media hate white quarterbacks, such as Brett Favre, Tom Brady, and Eli Manning.)
Grossman wasn’t criticized because he was white. He was criticized because he wasn’t very good. Grossman was replaced by Kyle Orton, a white quarterback who was less talented but made fewer mistakes, who in turn was replaced in 2009 by Jay Cutler, a white quarterback praised as the savior of the team by all of the media Limbaugh claimed to be prejudiced for blacks and against whites. Grossman had a career passer rating of 70.2.18 McNabb had a career passer rating of 85.9.19 Except for his rookie year, McNabb had nine consecutive years with a passer rating higher than Rex Grossman had ever achieved in any year. McNabb was voted to the Pro Bowl five times, and Grossman zero times. Coaches, players, and fans select the Pro Bowl players, and the media have no role. According to every statistical category, McNabb is a superior quarterback to Grossman.20
After being criticized for his racial remarks about Grossman, the radio host claimed: “Later in the program, I let the audience in on the gag, which was to tweak the media.”21 But that’s not true. He never made any comment during the program indicating that his comments about Grossman were some kind of joke.
LIMBAUGH’S DEFENDERS IN CONGRESS
Representative Steve King (R-IA) diverted a 2009 House committee hearing on severe football head injuries to focus on the person he thought was most victimized by the NFL: Rush Limbaugh. King read Limbaugh’s quote about Donovan McNabb and the media, and declared: “I’ve scoured this quote to try to find something that can be implied as racism on the part of Rush Limbaugh, and I can’t find it. There is an implication of racism on the part of the media.”22 Actually, the racism in Limbaugh’s comment is clear to see: If McNabb is an excellent quarterback, then diminishing his accomplishments and falsely claiming that race was the only reason why he was praised would indeed be racist.
It’s certainly possible to argue that McNabb is overrated—many quarterbacks on successful teams with good defensive squads are overrated—but it was Rush, not the media, who made race the overriding issue. In 2009 Limbaugh said once again that “the MEDIA was obsessed with the color of his skin” and claimed that his assertion was “undeniable.”23 If the media was really obsessed with McNabb’s race, then you’d imagine that Limbaugh would be able to come up with at least one solitary example of someone in the press expressing this racial preference for McNabb because he is a black quarterback. But Limbaugh has never offered any evidence.
Rush Limbaugh wasn’t racist for criticizing a black quarterback. But claiming without any evidence that everyone in the sports media is racially biased in favor of black people certainly falls into the category of what racists think. If someone declared that the only reason a successful black musician got positive reviews was because music critics want black artists to succeed, we would all wonder why such an individual was bringing up race when it should be irrelevant.
Representative King claimed, “I don’t think anything Rush Limbaugh said was offensive.”24 Perhaps that’s because King didn’t think Limbaugh had actually made the offensive comments he was quoted as saying. King said about the McNabb comment, “That’s the only quote that seems to survive the scrutiny of chase-checking back original sources in at least nine quotes that were alleged to the radio host. And, by the way, of those, eight are complete fabrications. They’re not based on anything. They’re not a misquote. They’re not a distortion. They’re complete fabrication.”25
I asked Representative King’s communications director what these eight “f...
RUSH LIMBAUGH’S RACISM
WHEN RUSH LIMBAUGH TRIED to buy a share of the St. Louis Rams in 2009, it sparked a national debate about race that went far beyond the football field. Several NFL players, including Mathias Kiwanuka, Bart Scott, and Donovan McNabb, announced publicly that they would not play for a team owned by Limbaugh.1
But the discussion of Limbaugh’s racism was quickly diverted by two fake quotes that had been attributed to the radio host around the Internet. In one, Limbaugh was falsely accused of saying, “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over one hundred years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” The other fake quote declared: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.” These quotes were apparently put up on Wikiquote in 2005 and then spread around the Internet by someone using the nickname Cobra.2 The fake quotes about Limbaugh were repeated by Rachel Maddow, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, Tamron Hall, CNN’s Rick Sanchez, MSNBC’s David Shuster, St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell, AlterNet’s Rory O’Connor, The Nation’s Dave Zirin, and many others.3
Rush rightly denounced “these slanderous, made-up, fabricated quotes found in a sewer on the Internet.”4 But Limbaugh wasn’t upset by these fake quotes; he was thrilled to draw attention away from all of his real racist quotes that he can’t deny. And the critics of Limbaugh had no sure way of knowing that the quotes had been faked, since he had never denied them. Limbaugh said, “Whatever happened to journalists calling people and saying, ‘Did you actually say this? I’m doing a story on blah, blah, blah. Did you actually say this?’”5 But when I sent the radio host an email asking if the quotes were real, he never responded to me.6
Bill O’Reilly declared: “The reason that Limbaugh is not going to be able to buy into the NFL is because a bunch of made-up stuff became legend. And he got hammered.... So what we have here are accusations without merit. But in our hypermedia age, that’s enough to paint someone as a racist.”7 However, the fake quotes had nothing to do with Rush being dropped from the bid; to the contrary, the quotes undermined the critics of Limbaugh by discrediting those who used them.
Limbaugh, like anyone else, should be free to buy a football team. But it is the NFL owners who restrict team ownership. It wasn’t liberal bias that caused his friends to drop him from their bid; he claimed the organizer of the bid, Dave Checketts, told him he “cleared [his] involvement with people at the highest levels of the National Football League.”8 As Dave Zirin noted, “This has nothing to do with Limbaugh’s conservative politics. Most NFL owners are to the right of Dick Cheney. Over twenty years, officials on twenty-three of the thirty-two NFL clubs have donated more money to Republicans than Democrats.”9 It was the corporate bias of the NFL, which feared the consequences of having a controversial figure owning a team, that led to him being dumped.
RACE AND THE BLACK QUARTERBACK
The statement that caused the most controversy for Limbaugh’s NFL bid came during his short-lived stint as a commentator on ESPN in 2003 when he said about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb: “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well.”10 Plenty of people have criticized prominent athletes or alleged that they’re overrated. But Rush did something very different by claiming that a black athlete was overrated because all of these white sports journalists love black people so much.
The radio host claimed, “All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something. If I wasn’t right, there wouldn’t be the cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sportswriter community.”11 This is a standard technique Limbaugh offers against all criticism. Whenever he says something outrageous, he then claims that there wouldn’t be any outrage if it were untrue.
But it wasn’t true. As Thomas George reported in The New York Times, “Among the black quarterbacks and the three black head coaches on the thirty-two NFL teams, there is a definitive feeling that they are on shorter leashes than their white counterparts.”12 FOX Sports cohost James Brown said: “In my eighteen years covering the NFL, I have not seen any of my media colleagues coddling McNabb or any other black quarterback. Just ask Kordell Stewart. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”13 A scientific study of more than ten thousand sports articles found “no support to Limbaugh’s position” that black quarterbacks were treated better by the media.14 Yet Limbaugh never apologized and never retracted his claims. He said about McNabb in 2009, “I said exactly what I meant, and if you want me to, I’ll say it again.”15
Rush Limbaugh’s harsh attacks on a black quarterback and accusations of media bias stand in sharp contrast to how he dealt with a white quarterback. Limbaugh came to the defense of white Chicago Bears quarterback Rex Grossman after media commentators criticized his performance in the 2007 Super Bowl: “They’re just all over this guy. They can’t wait for this guy to fail. They are hoping he fails.”16 While he may be an expert at hoping for failure, Limbaugh certainly isn’t one at media analysis: “The media, the sports media, has got social concerns that they are first and foremost interested in, and they’re dumping on this guy, Rex Grossman, for one reason, folks, and that’s because he is a white quarterback.”17 (Obviously, the media hate white quarterbacks, such as Brett Favre, Tom Brady, and Eli Manning.)
Grossman wasn’t criticized because he was white. He was criticized because he wasn’t very good. Grossman was replaced by Kyle Orton, a white quarterback who was less talented but made fewer mistakes, who in turn was replaced in 2009 by Jay Cutler, a white quarterback praised as the savior of the team by all of the media Limbaugh claimed to be prejudiced for blacks and against whites. Grossman had a career passer rating of 70.2.18 McNabb had a career passer rating of 85.9.19 Except for his rookie year, McNabb had nine consecutive years with a passer rating higher than Rex Grossman had ever achieved in any year. McNabb was voted to the Pro Bowl five times, and Grossman zero times. Coaches, players, and fans select the Pro Bowl players, and the media have no role. According to every statistical category, McNabb is a superior quarterback to Grossman.20
After being criticized for his racial remarks about Grossman, the radio host claimed: “Later in the program, I let the audience in on the gag, which was to tweak the media.”21 But that’s not true. He never made any comment during the program indicating that his comments about Grossman were some kind of joke.
LIMBAUGH’S DEFENDERS IN CONGRESS
Representative Steve King (R-IA) diverted a 2009 House committee hearing on severe football head injuries to focus on the person he thought was most victimized by the NFL: Rush Limbaugh. King read Limbaugh’s quote about Donovan McNabb and the media, and declared: “I’ve scoured this quote to try to find something that can be implied as racism on the part of Rush Limbaugh, and I can’t find it. There is an implication of racism on the part of the media.”22 Actually, the racism in Limbaugh’s comment is clear to see: If McNabb is an excellent quarterback, then diminishing his accomplishments and falsely claiming that race was the only reason why he was praised would indeed be racist.
It’s certainly possible to argue that McNabb is overrated—many quarterbacks on successful teams with good defensive squads are overrated—but it was Rush, not the media, who made race the overriding issue. In 2009 Limbaugh said once again that “the MEDIA was obsessed with the color of his skin” and claimed that his assertion was “undeniable.”23 If the media was really obsessed with McNabb’s race, then you’d imagine that Limbaugh would be able to come up with at least one solitary example of someone in the press expressing this racial preference for McNabb because he is a black quarterback. But Limbaugh has never offered any evidence.
Rush Limbaugh wasn’t racist for criticizing a black quarterback. But claiming without any evidence that everyone in the sports media is racially biased in favor of black people certainly falls into the category of what racists think. If someone declared that the only reason a successful black musician got positive reviews was because music critics want black artists to succeed, we would all wonder why such an individual was bringing up race when it should be irrelevant.
Representative King claimed, “I don’t think anything Rush Limbaugh said was offensive.”24 Perhaps that’s because King didn’t think Limbaugh had actually made the offensive comments he was quoted as saying. King said about the McNabb comment, “That’s the only quote that seems to survive the scrutiny of chase-checking back original sources in at least nine quotes that were alleged to the radio host. And, by the way, of those, eight are complete fabrications. They’re not based on anything. They’re not a misquote. They’re not a distortion. They’re complete fabrication.”25
I asked Representative King’s communications director what these eight “f...
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