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Is the Media in a Death Spiral?

by Rush Limbaugh - Sep 19,2018

RUSH: I have spent many, many moons on this program detailing for you what I think is an actual crack-up of the deep state and the media over this totally phony investigation into Trump and collusion with Russia.

I’ve done my best to express how genuinely outrageous and beyond that it is, how unprecedented it is in terms of arraying the forces of the federal government against a singular person and presidential campaign and then presidency. We’re in the middle of it. We follow it each and every day; so the impact may be not as great as it should be. But this is a genuine abomination what is happening here, what has happened to Donald Trump for the past two years. I have a story here — actually, a column.

It’s by Julie Kelly at AmGreatness.com, and the title of her piece: “Media Continues Its Slow Suicide,” and her opinion is that despite the appearance, despite how it looks on television every day that the media and their partners — their willing accomplices — are in the process of destroying themselves. They are destroying respectability. They are destroying their own credibility. They are in the process of literally a death spiral because of their contempt for Trump and their efforts to destroy a duly elected president.

I realize a lot of you are not buying it. “That’s crazy. The media is not destroying itself! The media is only destroying Trump, only destroying Republicans. The media isn’t hurting itself.” I know it’s hard to see, and I know it doesn’t feel like the media is losing anything, and I know things look depressing. That’s by design. But the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are on the same desperate mission, and it is a death spiral fight for survival for them right now.

They are slashing, splashing, smashing out, doing everything they can to save themselves. They do not run Washington. Donald Trump does. They are beside themselves that they haven’t been able to take him out. They’re beside themselves they haven’t been able to drive him out. They’re beside themselves that they have not been able to split you away from him, and they’re going more and more insane over their failures each and every day. The Woodward book. The Omarosa stuff!

All of this has come out and Trump is still there, and he’s still leading, and he’s still dominating, and has a still triumphing. These questions got themselves talked into this business that they’re gonna win the House, they’re gonna win the Senate, they’re gonna impeach Trump. Today they’re gonna impeach Kavanaugh! If Kavanaugh gets confirmed, if they’re not able to stop him… This is from Eric Swalwell from California. (paraphrased) “If Kavanaugh gets confirmed and as expected, the Democrats win the House and Senate, then we’re gonna impeach Kavanaugh as well as impeach Trump!”

They are convinced that what they are doing is lauded and being supported and applauded by the vast majority of the American people. They continue to conduct and publish what I think are crazy polls that they end believing, just like Hillary believed the polls that she was gonna win in a landslide. The latest polls that I saw is from Reuters/Ipsos and you know what it says? The American public is losing faith fast in Brett Kavanaugh.

The American public may not support Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court! Well, that doesn’t matter, number one. But No. 2, I just refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that a majority of the American people are watching what’s happening here and supporting it and applauding it. I think that there is so much disgust out there, I think there is so much outrage, I think people are livid at what they’re watching being done to Kavanaugh!

After having seen it happen to Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork and after having seen this… Kavanaugh’s only getting now what Trump gets every day. Trump gets this every day and d I think people are fed up with it. I think a lot of people are fed up with it. I know the polls are out there, Democrats are gonna sweep this and that. But then something got in the way, folks. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but there was a shocking special election win by a Republican last night in Texas.

Voters elected political newcomer Pete Flores to the Texas Senate on Tuesday, flipping a Democrat district red for the first time in 139 years and bolstering Republicans’ supermajority in the chamber ahead of November elections. Wait a minute. I thought Beto, whatever his name, was gonna beat Cruz, that the Texas Republicans were gonna lose Texas, the Senate, everything else, and Texas was on the verge of becoming a blue state! Why, that’s what all the polls say.

Texas is in the middle of going like California and New York and so forth. And then this happened. This is a district that Hillary Clinton won. I forget the majority here,

but it’s 73% black and Hispanic. It’s 23% white privilege, and they elected a Republican for the first time in 139 years. “A retired game warden, [Pete] Flores defeated former state and U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego for the Senate District 19 seat after receiving backing from some of the state’s most prominent politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and U.S. Sens John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. …

“According the secretary of state’s website, Flores won with 53% of the vote, Gallego at 47%, there 44,487 ballots cast.” This wasn’t supposed to happen. Remember, Texas is going blue! This is a blue district in Texas that the Democrats have held for 139 years, and a Republican won it. How in the hell does that happen? Now, my overall point with this is that I think that Julie Kelly has a point. But I have to take a break, as always. We see right… And I really just get revved and ready and I get right to the sweet spot; then I look at the clock and go, “Damn it.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I have cited the work of Lee Smith several times. He’s worked at a website called, I think, Tablet. His work has appeared a lot of places. He’s done some of the best investigative work along with a lot of other people in uncovering the hoax and the scam that is the Steele Dossier, Papadopoulos, the entire lies, series of lies that Trump colluded with Russia.

He has written a piece called “Extinction Level.” Well, it’s not what it’s called, but he describes in this piece what he says is an “extinction-level event” for the media. And it consists of much of what he has been reporting on, text messages between Strzok Smirk and Lisa Page; just the general collapse in trustworthiness that people have for some of these law enforcement institutions, DOJ, FBI, the intelligence community, and so forth.

But Smith believes that the media’s in the process of literally crashing and burning here and sacrificing every bit of credibility and reputation they’ve ever had in service to the advancement of agenda, and that more people than ever before are now seeing what the media is and what it’s becoming. And as that continues to expand, they lose more and more credibility and believability. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are people out there actively who think this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Carmel, Indiana. Tracy, welcome. Glad you waited. You’re up next for the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Wow, Rush. What an honor.

RUSH: Thank you!

CALLER: Mega dittos from the great unwashed Midwest.

RUSH: (laughing) Ha-ha-ha. Right where I’m from, by the way.

CALLER: Absolutely. So, I was giving my daughter the CliffsNotes version on Brett Kavanaugh, and then I tuned in and you were talking about the media and how they’re all-in and they’re selling it and giving it all they got. And I just want some reassurance from you about what percentage of people do you think are buying that schlock? You know, a lot of people are disgusted about politics, they don’t want to hear about it anymore, but if we don’t pay attention, this stuff keeps going on.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know.

CALLER: So I just wonder, should we pay attention than not?

RUSH: Well, let me answer this. The first thing I have to tell you that is that nothing, nowhere, no how, any ways, is going to change the way the media is doing, what it’s doing about this or any other story. They, in any number of public opinion polls, the media is like sitting there with 2 to 5% respect. It’s lower than Congress in many polls, just as an industry and as a business, as a political entity. The media doesn’t care. It’s the one business where they don’t give a rat’s rear end what the customer think because they have a disdain and a contempt for the customer. Look at CNN! CNN has been hemorrhaging audience for two years. They don’t care. It doesn’t matter to them.

CALLER: I know. But I still see it on in my bank. When I go into the bank in the red county, in the red state where I live, I see CNN. I don’t get why there isn’t more of public outrage about it.

RUSH: Well, we don’t know that there isn’t. The polling data is suggestive that people are not buying what they see. Look. This is a real tough one. It’s a tough thing to answer. That’s why, I’ve got this piece here that ran in American Greatness by Julie Kelly who thinks that the media, and she’s got some assists here from a column, great guy called Lee Smith. They think that the media is committing suicide specifically with the way they’ve been conducting business since the presidential campaign and after Trump was elected. But you don’t believe that, I can tell, ’cause you go into your bank and there’s CNN, you don’t see anybody committing suicide, you see ‘em still on the air.

CALLER: Absolutely. And I’m really surprised there hasn’t been another major upstart of a conservative news outlet. I get Breitbart and all those things. I just mean besides Fox, I’m surprised nobody’s built a website like Twitter for conservatism.

RUSH: Well, I… Look, I can only guess. I could only guess at that.

CALLER: Well, I’m gonna get on and drive my school bus. I have to go. I’m so thrilled to talk to you, but I want to tell you thanks for the Rush Revere books. My homeschooled daughters have really enjoyed them; so thanks, and I hope they keep coming.

RUSH: Well, thank you very much. You even said homeschool. You drive a school bus.

CALLER: I did!

RUSH: Awesome. Awesome. Well look, I’m glad you called, Tracy, thank you very much. Folks, I wish I had confident, comforting predictions about the media. What I know is that no matter how bad it gets for them, no matter how much audience they lose, no matter how much money their parent companies lose, they’re not gonna change. The last thing they’re gonna do.

They’re gonna remain who they are and what they are and how they do it regardless, because they are a political entity in their own minds. They’re not a business entity. The people that work in media don’t care about profitability. In fact, most of them think that the news divisions of the companies for which they work ought not even be subject to bottom line consideration because they have a constitutional duty.

And there should be any limits on money, and there shouldn’t be any profit pressures. But in terms of it affecting their content, it ain’t gonna happen. They’ll just keep playing people off, if they continue to lose money, but it’s not gonna have any kind of impact that you would expect any other business losing customers would adapt and change. Not the media. So however bad it gets for them, you’re really not gonna see the evidence of it because they’re gonna keep doing as they always have.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me read to you just a couple of excerpts from Julie Kelly’s piece, “Media Continues its Slow Suicide.” Now, you’ve heard much of this from your host. Her uniqueness here is that she is predicting that all of this is gonna lead to the media imploding and destroying itself, and I’m just… I would love to tell you I agree with her about this. You know, there are a lot of people… During the Clinton years and all through Obama years I can remember the number of moralists, for example, on our side — good people — who wrote that Clinton doing this or Obama doing that or now the FBI, DOJ doing this is going to destroy the their collective reputations and so forth.

And it didn’t happen. It was like these people were stuck in a period of time in the past where there was such a thing as public shame and that a reputation was subject to one’s own integrity or lack thereof. But people with no integrity and dishonesty who are able to pull that off in a likable way would keep getting away with it. Here you got a guy, Kavanaugh, who has an impeccable reputation and virtually every aspect of his life, every aspect. His reputation, character, unassailable — and now, where is it?

What would you say they have done to his reputation? While Ted Kennedy kills a woman, has a habit of abusing and disrespecting women, abusing them sexually down here in Palm Beach with his nephew, William Kennedy Smith. Mary Jo Kopechne! What’d they do? They turn him into the lion of the Senate. He becomes one of the most respected, revered Democrats ever. Bill Clinton, ditto. Meanwhile, Clarence, there was never a shred of evidence he did anything that they said — and zilch, zero, nada for Kavanaugh — and yet look what happened to them.

You want to tell me that there’s any justice in this? There isn’t any justice in this whatsoever. The left doesn’t care. They are happy! They’re more than happy to destroy people. They attempt it every day, depending on who they think is in their way. So, yeah, a lot of people over the years have expected the kind of behavior to come back and haunt these people and bite ’em in the rear.

But the last I looked, Ted Kennedy passed away with glowing hero worship by everybody in the Democrat Party. You couldn’t get them to talk about his at all teammate of women, show any kind of disrespect for him whatsoever. Ditto with Bill Clinton — and the list on the Democrat side’s longer than just those two. So the belief that somehow there is a moral code that ends up meting out, handing out justice? I don’t think people believe that anymore.

I don’t think people believe that there is a set of standards that define goodness and decency and that they triumph. I think what people are seeing is that indecency, perversion, lying, character assassination and assault are what is winning. They are the champions of political life in America today. So you can forgive people if they don’t believe that all of this is eventually gonna come back and bite people and hold them accountable. But here we have…

Conrad Black is one of those people. Conrad Black is insistent that these people gonna pay a price they can’t even imagine paying, that the American people are gonna be the ones to let them know what a bunch of reprobates everybody think they are. Conrad Black has untold faith that this is gonna happen. So does Julie Kelly writing in American Greatness, and so does Lee Smith. Here’s an excerpt of what she’s written. You’ve heard much of this on this program.

She says, “[T]here is a more sinister agenda behind this collective media cacophony: To hide their complicity in the biggest political scandal of all time, which included the weaponization of the nation’s most powerful government agencies to spy on a rival presidential campaign; the illegal leaking of classified information to friendly journalists to defame American citizens associated with the [Trump] campaign; and the sabotage of an incoming presidency, the media is happy to distract us with manufactured non-scandals that advance the political interests of their friends.”

Look there’s been there’s no question, I believe the Mueller investigation is, in large part, a massive cover-up of the real crimes committed by the people that run that town — the Democrats, the media, people in the Washington establishment. That’s all to be covered up. They’re the ones that committed real crimes, and they continue to commit them against the Trump presidency. She continues here.

“Each week, new details emerge about how the media seeded the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.” That has been uncovered, by the way. They ran… I’ll tell you how they did it. They ran a test program on this with the Iran nuclear program. They fed a bunch of journalists a bunch of garbage to see if they would repeat it and report it, and they did! They didn’t even question what they were being told!

The Obama administration actually told a journalist that Russia was responsible for the destruction of a dam in Vermont, and the guy rehab the story. The dam has not been destroyed. It’s still functioning. So the Obama administration seeds journalists with a bunch of garbage just to see if they run it. So they ran it during the Iran nuclear deal news cycle; so they figure they could get away with leaking a bunch of stuff not true about Trump and collusion Russia — and they were right, because the media is a bunch of liberal Democrat sycophants!

So she writes, “Each week, new details emerge about how the media seeded the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. High-level federal officials acting in bad faith schemed with reporters eager for a scoop to spin nefarious tales about the president and his aides. Some of the resultant articles were cited as evidence to persuade a secret court to allow the U.S. government to spy on private citizens.

“Former FBI Director James Comey admitted he had a friend leak a copy of his internal memo to the press to help prompt the special counsel probe into Trump-Russia collusion.” This writer, Julie Kelly, thinks all this stuff is gonna come back and bite these people and sink them. And my question is, “With who? Who’s gonna sink ’em?” The American people? The American people, if they lose respect for the media, does that sink the media?

I don’t think so because that’s already happened. What’s gonna sink the media? RICO lawsuits? (laughing) I don’t know! What’s gonna sink the media? What’s gonna shame these people? There ought to be piles and piles of shame over what is being done to Brett Kavanaugh. Dianne Feinstein should be ashamed. Chuck Schumer should be ashamed. These people ought to be literally embarrassed about what they’re doing!

But they’re not.

They’re patting each other on the back.

They’re already throwing advance parties because they think they’re gonna delay this and win Senate and deny this nomination. They applauding each other on the back for subscribing a wonderful man and his family. They ought to be ashamed. They ought to have guilt complexes just bollixing them up so they’re unable to function! Most normal people wouldn’t be able to live with themselves pulling off stunts like this over and over and over again.

“Well, it’s what the Republicans did! It’s what the Republicans did to Merrick Garland.” Republicans didn’t do anything of the sort to Merrick Garland! They just delayed the vote, that’s all, because it was an election year for which there was Democrat Party precedent? Thank you, Joe Biden.


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