RUSH: Sean somewhere in Pennsylvania, great to have you, sir, on the program. Welcome.
CALLER: Rush, mega dittos from a longtime listener. By the way, I’ve got right in front of me my yellowed autographed 38-year-old copy of All the President’s Men, so I have standing. Yesterday Woodward, who is really the elder statesman of American journalism, called the president the black Nixon. But what he actually did was remind me one of the reasons, I believe, why you have low-information voters —
RUSH: Well, now, wait just a second. People are not gonna understand. He didn’t call him a black Nixon. He said that he’s Nixon. He’s like Nixon. The fact that he’s black is incidental. It’s true, but he didn’t call him the black Nixon. I know what you mean.
CALLER: I inferred it, of course.
RUSH: Yes. Yes. Okay.
CALLER: Okay, anyway, so he reminded me why you have low-information voters, readers, and viewers. And this is something I haven’t heard discussed. It’s decades of editors who were either weak or missing in action, editors used to be the tough news people who stood their ground, led their reporters to seek the truth. Unfortunately today, most of them in print and broadcast, they tremble if they don’t get access, and, sadly — and we used to joke about this years ago — never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.
RUSH: Well, the access angle is right. That’s everything ’cause of the celebrity aspect of it. It’s not access for news. It’s access for celebrity. That’s what the entertainment media is all about, it’s access to the celebrities. It’s what the sports media is. Basically, you have a bunch of groupies, is what you’re saying.
CALLER: Rush, it’s newsertainment. It’s not news, it’s newsertainment.
RUSH: That’s exactly right.
CALLER: Anyway, can I give you one last quick idea?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: In your shop, I don’t know if you sell sweatshirts or not, but whether it’s a sweatshirt or a mug, I think you should create one that says, “Sequester me, bro.”
RUSH: “Sequester me” what?
CALLER: Bro, b-r-o. Remember the guy —
RUSH: Oh, “Sequester me, bro.” Yes. Now, see, the problem is, if we do that your lawyer is gonna call and want royalties on it. We’re gonna have hell to pay for doing it. I know people like you and I know how you operate.
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RUSH: Some people think, by the way, that the importance of the Woodward story is not that he was threatened or any of that, but some people say — I’m not necessarily agreeing here — some people think it’s the first time that anybody in the media has drawn blood from the regime, gotten a rise out of ’em, caused ’em to be upset and lash out in public in a way that everybody knows about it. Anyway, all kinds of theories abound here, and we have more of them and more of the program coming right back at you.
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RUSH: You know our last caller had a really, really, really good point about the way it used to be not that long ago in the media and the way it is today, and what editors used to do versus what editors do today. The guy was talking about access. There’s only one area that I would disagree with what he said, and it’s a minor thing. He said that in the old days, the editors were the guys that really had the focus and they’re the ones that sent the reporters out. They assigned them.
They’re the ones that had their eyes on the truth and wanted to find out what’s happening. Except, I think for as long as I’ve been alive, the media has always been about advancing the left, liberalism. I think they’ve always been unbiased; I don’t care what they say. I think the business of putting together the news every day was always related to the agenda. Whether they knew it or not, it was just the product of their education. The liberal agenda was what they were convinced reality was. Anything outside of that was not real.
It was the home of kooks and weirdos. But what he said about the young crop of editors today being just paranoid for access, he was dead-on right about. It’s true in any area of the news, be it the so-called entertainment news media or anything else. You look at these programs like Entertainment Tonight or the E! Entertainment channel or Extra or whatever. You never see them ripping… Well, there are rare exceptions. If the entire industry decides to dump on somebody, they’ll join in, such as a Mel Gibson.
But for the most part, when you watch these shows every night — take a chance at it, Entertainment Tonight, Extra, whatever — they make the people they cover out to be the biggest heroes and heroines. We all know they’re stars, but they are built up and put on pedestals, and where do these people go? They go to all these red carpet things. The media people, they get red carpets. They go to pre-party, the after party. They are still the media when they’re in there but they are in there.
They’re still rubbing elbows, and they’ve got pictures of themselves with take your pick of whatever actor or actress. All their friends think their jobs are really cool. It is all about access. In the sports media… Look, I have been there, and in this case I know this. I know it’s true there. The number of people in the sports media who are groupies would stun you, and it’s about access. He is so right on when he talked about access being the way newsmakers keep the media in line. If they do anything that will put their access at risk, that’s a no-no.
That means they’ll never be hypercritical — critical at all — and I think it’s really exaggerated with Obama, ’cause that’s the biggest access you can get. It was with Clinton, too. It’s all still ideology. The same media didn’t care about access to Bush other than being able to do the job, but they didn’t want to hang around Bush because Bush was a celebrity to them. Clinton was, Obama is, Michelle Obama is, Hillary was. Republican presidents are not.
They still want the access as one way to get the goods, to be able to come up with what these cheaters are really doing in the case of Republicans. With Democrat presidents, it’s to be close to celebrity, close to their idols. The guy was right on the money, but it’s not just the editors. It’s the reporters, which puts this Woodward stuff in a little different light because Woodward is beyond that. As the caller said, he’s AARP.