RUSH: This is the first guy that’s gotten this right. It’s the first guy that’s gotten this right in 28 years, 24 years, 26 years, whatever the number. This was Sunday morning on C-SPAN, Washington Journal.

The host, Steve Scully is talking to NBC national political correspondent Steve Kornacki. Kornacki has a new book. It’s called The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. And Scully says to Kornacki, “Talk about the issue of opinion journalism which we see on Fox and PMSNBC and CNN.”

KORNACKI: Roger Ailes in 1996, he had produced Rush Limbaugh’s television show in the early 1990s. He saw, through Rush Limbaugh I think, he saw through Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and his television show in the 1990s that there was this very large audience on the right that was very dissatisfied with the idea of the mainstream media.

RUSH: He’s the only guy who’s actually gotten this right. They always say that Ailes created Limbaugh and Fox News. And then they always try to distance Ailes from having had anything to do with my TV show, that Fox News started out of the witch’s brew of nothing and so forth. Kornacki’s the first guy to get this timeline and the circle of events correctly.

There’s some people who have gotten close.

Some people have said, “You know, when Fox News started it was like talk radio on TV.” And people, “I wonder where Ailes got that idea” people would say. And I would just stand there and smile, kind of wink and nod. But nobody ever wanted to connect the two because that would mean putting me in the equation. And we can’t do that. So I don’t know what got into Kornacki, NBC News national political correspondent, but he got it right.