RUSH: Okay, Bill Moyers yesterday was in Washington at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention. What…? There are more oxymorons in that title than I can count: the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention. Bill Moyers gave the keynote speech. Here is a portion of his remarks attacking your host.
MOYERS: Journalism is under fire from ideologues. The journalist who is reporting and dares to challenge their party line, becomes a candidate for Guantanamo. Rush Limbaugh, notably, railed against journalists for reporting on the torture at Abu Ghraib, which he dismissed as a little sport for soldiers under stress. He told his audience, quote, ‘This is no different from what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. You ever heard of people who need to blow off some steam?’ The Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the right-wing echo chamber from which so many millions of Americans now get their news. So I wasn’t surprised to read that nationwide survey by the Chicago Tribune in which half respondents said there should have been some kind of press restraint on the reporting about the prison abuse.
RUSH: This is unbelievable. In the first place, he does not have a sense of humor, but none of them on the left do. They cannot laugh. Number two, I’m reminded of the poll that the Pew people just put out showing that the American people think that — a vast majority, by the way of — the Drive-By Media is inaccurate, is biased and doesn’t think or care much about them. When you hear this kind of elitism from Bill Moyers… When I saw the first pictures of Abu Ghraib with the Islamofascists in a pyramid, I said it looked like a fraternity hazing stunt. My reaction to this is because I knew what the people reporting on this, like Mr. Moyers, were trying to do. You were trying to destroy the U.S. military. You were trying to destroy its credibility. You were trying to harm the war effort. You were doing everything you could to turn public opinion against the war, and you took the occasion of what happened here and you tried to paint, tar and feather the entire U.S. Military as being just like those renegades inside Abu Ghraib.
What went on in there does not justify calling for U.S. defeat. What went on in there does not justified calling for U.S. withdrawal. It does not justify painting the U.S. Military as a bunch of barbarians. It doesn’t justify anything that you in the media did. The thing that you’ve got to understand that you never will understand is, the American people love winners! The American people do not want to lose, especially in a fight. The American people have respect for the men and women in the Armed Forces. Like any other group, they understand that there’s going to be some bad apples and some renegades in there. They also understand that these people are under enormous stress. They’re under enormous tension. They’re putting their lives on the line every day, and the effort that people like Moyers and the rest of the Drive-By Media made, is to take that incident and trump up a bunch of stuff that wasn’t true like a Koran being flushed down a toilet at club Club Gitmo. Thank you, Mike Isikoff. It turned out not to be true. We never got a retraction, never got so much as an apology for that. But people know this is inaccurate stuff. It’s based in bias.
The American people do not hate the institutions and traditions that have made this country great, and they resent the efforts of a bunch of elitists to make them try to hate the U.S. Military. They don’t want to hate the U.S. Military like the left in this country does, and when the traditions and institutions that I value, that I know have made this country great come under attack, you are damn right I’m going to defend them — and I’m going to defend the people in them! I’m going to defend those institutions. I’m not going to defend the people who may have engaged in torture. I’m not going to defend the people who acted outside the bounds. But I’m not going to tar and feather the whole U.S. Military with it, and I’m not going to beat up my whole country, and I’m not going to run around trying to get everybody else to hate my country because of something as innocuous as that, in the big picture. There was no sense of proportion reporting on that! You were making us out to be worse than the enemy we face.
There weren’t any beheadings in there. There weren’t any electrocutions. There weren’t any of the absolute sub-human horrors that our enemy perpetrates against us and others. We all know what Abu Ghraib was about for you, Mr. Moyers and the rest of you. That was proof positive for you that this country is worthless. That is proof positive to you that this country is the problem in the world — and the American people, Mr. Moyers, who in greater numbers disrespect you and people in your profession, understand that the United States is the solution to the world’s problems.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Alright, let’s get back to the Bill Moyers sound bites. He’s just finished attacking me for ‘attacking’ journalists. He’s speaking at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual convention yesterday. He gave the keynote speech. Here is the second of our three bites.
MOYERS: Journalists and others who tried to challenge the administration’s fallacious evidence for invading Iraq found the Patriot Police on their tail. Whatever Kool-Aid he’s brewing for the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch could make a singular contribution to journalism simply by calling Fox News from the Republican fog machine and giving it a mandate to report reality instead of attacking those who do.
RUSH: I don’t know what… I’m beginning to think this is not going to be a fair fight. I don’t think he’s… You know, the cylinders aren’t all clicking here. This is just derangement. This is utter derangement. ‘Journalists and others who tried to challenge the administration’s fallacious evidence for invading Iraq found the Patriot Police on their tail.’ Uh, Mr. Moyers, the most offensive thing about this comment is that I am the chief of the Patriot Police, not Rupert Murdoch. I am! Next, this just makes you cry. This just makes you cry, folks, because there’s nobody in journalism making any money.
MOYERS: I heard this week from a talented freelance reporter in his thirties who made the media beat a specialty. He told me the problem in journalism isn’t that there are no jobs. ‘As a freelancer in broadcasting, I don’t have a profile in print to land big magazine assignments, the only kind that pay well. I’m at the top of NPR’s freelance scale,’ he said. ‘But NPR pays freelancers dismally. I make less than $1,000 for a piece that takes four solid days to report and produce.’ Some people who consider their craft, our craft, a calling are working off the clock to ensure that the facts are properly checked.
RUSH: Yes, and they are failing miserably! They’re failing miserably. They’re not doing the fact-checking! A thousand dollars for four days work? (sobbing) It’s so hard! (crying). If this is such a great calling, who cares about money? By the way, Mr. Moyers, did you tell the audience how much PBS has paid you over the years? Six to seven million a year in one year, I think. Did you tell them this? How about your son and how much money he’s getting. These crocodile tears… let me tell you something about Bill Moyers, folks. This is from a Bob Novak column back on December 1st of 2005. This is a column about Judge Laurence Silberman who was a great man, and Silberman had made some comments about J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, which Silberman had investigated decades ago. Let me read you read you an excerpt from the Novak piece. ‘Even worse than ‘dirt collection,’ Silberman continued, was Hoover’s offering of Bureau files to presidents. He exempted only Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower from this use of FBI files, but said, ‘Lyndon Johnson was the most demanding,” of FBI files.
‘When President Johnson’s aide Walter Jenkins was arrested for homosexual conduct in a men’s room during the 1964 campaign, Silberman said, LBJ aide Bill Moyers directed Hoover to find similar conduct on Barry Goldwater’s staff.’ He’s a hack, folks! He’s not a ‘journalist’ and civil libertarian. He is a Democrat-liberal hack! So he asks Hoover to find ‘similar conduct’ on Barry Goldwater’s Staff. ”Moyers’ memo to the FBI was in one of the files,’ [Silberman said]. An ‘outraged’ Moyers telephoned Silberman, he said, to assert that the memo was ‘phony,” and Silberman, who was a gentleman, was, ”Taken aback…’ [H]e offered an investigation to publicly exonerate Moyers. ‘There was a pause on the line, and then he [Moyers] said, ‘I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?”’ He admitted it! He admitted calling J. Edgar Hoover for dirt on somebody in Goldwater’s campaign. ”Silberman’s account of our conversation is at odds with mine,’ Moyers told [Novak] when I asked for comment.’
So Moyers was demanding that J. Edgar Hoover find the kind of dirt that just happened to be discovered about one of LBJ’s guys, and then after Silberman was gone, he said, ‘Oh, I don’t think his recollection of that conversation is not quite the same as mine.’ He is a liberal-Democrat hack, hiding under the guise of being a ‘journalist,’ and a civil libertarian.
Here’s the Reuters thing, and again, this goes back to the poll from Pew that the vast majority of the American people think they lie, that they’re inaccurate, that they have bias and they don’t care about their consumers. ‘News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic. The images were reproduced around the world – including by the [UK] Guardian and Guardian Unlimited – alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week. But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago. This footage was used in sequences [the movie Titanic in 1997]. The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie’ Titanic.
‘Reuters has now apologized [sic] for the error and has made changes to its video material on the expedition, with captions denoting the various origins of the file footage used.’ What do you mean apologized? This is exactly the kind of stuff that’s been going on! They did it on purpose. How do you…? You cannot convince me that somebody at Reuters actually thought that that was video footage of a bunch of Russians on the floor of the North Pole planting a flag! They had to know what it was. They had to know where to go get it, and they tried to pass it off as something that it wasn’t — and not one of their newspapers caught it. Not one of their member websites caught it. A thirteen-year-old kid caught it! I’m surprised Reuters didn’t say, ‘This kid doesn’t know journalism! Tell the kid to shut up and go back to school,’ because that generally is the Drive-By attitude.
BREAK TRANSCRTIPT
RUSH: This is Bob in Callahan, Florida. Thank you for calling, sir. It’s nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: It’s great to talk to you. Hey, listen, I’ve been wanting to call for a while. I’m kind of nervous, so, just bear with me.
RUSH: I will do that.
CALLER: This thing with Bill Moyers?
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: It goes a lot deeper than Bill Moyers, but my problem is that every time that I see you on the air, on like mainstream media or anywhere you’re quoted in the mainstream media, you’re misquoted — and the reason why I know this is because I was telling your screener that I was in a conference in New York City, and on one of the monitors there, they didn’t have the sound up but I saw your face and I saw Michael J. Fox’s name on there, and so when I heard the news, I heard what they were talking about and then immediately I went to your website and here’s the deal, is that any of these media people can go to your website. If they’re blind, if they’re deaf, they can go to your website and they can get exactly what you said, word-for-word. You don’t leave anything out of your website on your daily shows, and even if you go back to your archives, you can see and listen to exactly what you said and there is never any reason for them to take you out of context and these people are supposed to be professional reporters. I don’t understand it. If little old me can walk to my computer within ten minutes and find out exactly what you said, why is it that they can’t? I mean, I know the answer to that.
RUSH: I am once again reminded of the Pew poll that shows vast majorities of the American people think that there is bias and inaccuracy in the Drive-By Media, and that the Drive-By Media doesn’t care about the people that are their customers, their consumers that they are reporting for, working for. In this case, you are absolutely right. We have marveled at this ourselves for years. How difficult is it, especially since the Drive-Bys don’t listen to this show — well, they probably do but they’d never admit it. But most of them probably don’t. You know there’s one website where they go to find out what was happening on this program, what was said.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: Media Matters for America. It’s a Hillary Clinton front group, funded by George Soros, and its purpose is to take things out of context here and misreport and cast aspersions. The Drive-By Media chooses a website to find out what I said, but it’s not mine.
CALLER: Yeah, but, you know, all any reasonable person… I mean, even… See, I’ve been a subscriber to your website since the beginning.
RUSH: I know. It defies explanation, other than they don’t want me to be reported upon accurately because they are trying to harm my credibility. They cannot beat people like me in the arena of ideas, Bob.
CALLER: Yeah, but they can’t do that with somebody like me who is a regular listener, listening to you.
RUSH: I’m not saying they succeed at it, but they’ve been trying for 19 years to discredit me in the eyes of people like you.
CALLER: Yeah, but even the people who disagree with you… Don’t you think a reasonable person who disagrees with you can go to the free side?
RUSH: You would be stunned at how many don’t. You would be stunned at how many fringe, kook Democrats refuse! They don’t want to know. They live in a cocoon. They have a world view…
CALLER: I have a whole family who does this.
RUSH: Then you know. They have a world view. They live in a cocoon where the image of conservatives is ABCDE; image of Limbaugh is HIJKLM. Anything that challenges that, they don’t want to expose themselves to.
CALLER: Yeah, but isn’t this part of a bigger picture? If they’re going to lie about you when they know that I can go check —
RUSH: Amen! Amen! Amen! If they’re going to run phony photos during the Hezbo-Israeli war, as they did, Photoshopped photos, and they’re running phony photos about a Russian mission to the North Pole; if they’re not going to report accurately about me or President Bush or anybody else accurately, then why would you trust anything else that they tell you?