We’ve seen this play out during the pandemic with deadly consequences. When you look at talk radio and Fox News today, the most successful employ the same model of dishonesty and manipulation of their audience. Sadly, the vast majority of conservative media feeds misinformation to their audiences. Politifact, the fact-checking website, has analyzed about 50 of Limbaugh’s higher profile controversial statements and labeled the majority of them “mostly false,” “false” or “pants on fire.” Recent examples include his assertions that House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump “doesn’t feature the opposition party, it doesn’t feature cross examination,” that Joe Biden’s Democratic Convention speech “had to be taped in segments, and the segments had to be edited together,” and that “the coronavirus is the common cold.” This area of dishonesty I find most troubling because it is pervasive in the conservative media world and Limbaugh led the way on lies and disinformation for most of his career. That gets me to the greatest harm of Limbaugh’s legacy: the destruction of truth, the manipulation of his audience and the promotion of conspiracies. I also realize that as a talk radio host, as I was as a politician, I can only speak my truth. He helped make our nation more divided and polarized than it has been in years. He also leaves behind a conservative movement no longer interested in truth. He leaves behind a conservative movement shaped by his voice and his politics. He’s gone now, dying at the age of 70 of lung cancer, his wife, Kathryn Limbaugh, announced on his radio show Wednesday. Rush Limbaugh was the original superstar conservative talk radio show host, helping to give birth to many other hosts over these past 30-plus years, including myself. My son kept laughing at me because I spent most of that five-hour ride talking out loud to the radio, fired up because finally there was someone out there who sort of spoke for me and my politics. I had my year-old son in the back, flipped on a talk radio station and there was this cocky voice throwing insults at liberals and echoing so much of what I believed. I was on the road, driving from Chicago to see my sister in Cincinnati. I first heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio circa 1989.
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