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Lame Limbaugh obits: Mainstream media fawns over a toxic bigot who poisoned our politics
Lame Limbaugh obits: Mainstream media fawns over a toxic bigot who poisoned our politics
Major media finally turned against Trump — but keeps on normalizing the culture of hatred that made him possible
By DAN FROOMKIN
FEBRUARY 18, 2021 11:00AM
(Salon) Leaders of our elite newsrooms had a full year to figure out how they were going to frame Rush Limbaugh's life.
He announced he was dying of lung cancer last February, right before Donald Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. It was a striking moment, symbolic of how thoroughly Limbaugh's moral rot had infected the body politic, all the way to the presidency and its most hallowed traditions.
In the ensuing months, even the most stubbornly aloof mainstream news organizations began to publicly acknowledge Trump as a liar, a failure, a loser and an inciter of division and violence.
....(snip)....
And that is why, even with a year to pre-write and edit them, major media outlets on Wednesday published obituaries celebrating Limbaugh's extraordinary success as a "conservative provocateur." They whitewashed his once-unimaginably vile and divisive demagoguery as "comic bombast." They hailed him as "the voice of American conservatism," when what really matters about Rush Limbaugh is that he spread hatred more effectively and lucratively than any American before him. He didn't hide his bigotry and, eventually, neither did the Republican Party.
....(snip)....
The Associated Press obituary, by Matt Sedensky, which is certain to appear in countless newspapers, was headlined "Rush Limbaugh, 'voice of American conservatism,' has died." That was the AP's own characterization, despite the quotation marks. The story quoted Ronald Reagan calling him "the number one voice for conservatism," which is a bit different.
The lead paragraph was effusive:
Rush Limbaugh, the talk radio host who ripped into liberals and laid waste to political correctness with a gleeful malice that made him one of the most powerful voices in politics, influencing the rightward push of American conservatism and the rise of Donald Trump, died Wednesday. He was 70.
....(snip)....
There's no denying Limbaugh was a giant, and that his life makes a helluva story. But his legacy is not a media empire, it's his extraordinary influence on the rise of far-right, white-supremacist, reality-denying nationalism. He, as much as anyone, brought us Trump: the constant lying, the virulent racism and misogyny, the hostility toward governing, the corruption, and ultimately COVID denialism and insurrection. .............(more)
https://www.salon.com/2021/02/18/lame-limbaugh-obits-media-fawns-over-the-toxic-bigot-who-poisoned-our-politics/
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