Rush Limbaugh Fools Some Editors
   Just As Easily As Some Of The Public

By William Finucane

Sitting at the desk, there was a beautiful woman, the epitome of style, someone recognized as good with news writing and managing copy, while also excelling at handling difficult people on the telephone, all in all a top notch editor.

I walked past her desk as she pulled up the news wire.

And there he was, Rush Limbaugh, his picture and a story about him having to resign for come comments he made about a black quarterback getting preferential treatment from the National Football League and the media.

"Wow," I said, "Rush put his foot in his mouth, didn’t he? What a jerk!"

Her quick and strong response shocked me.

"No, it was the media, the media he criticized. And he didn’t say anything discriminatory. So you’re wrong, Bill. You’re just wrong," said the woman.

Not having a text of his speech and being completely surprised by her position, I simply shut up and walked away.

A few minutes later I apologized for walking so brusquely away.

"Oh, that’s alright, Bill, we can have disagreements and be friends," she smiled.

Could I have been wrong?

Could Rush have been misinterpreted?

I got a text of what he said.

No, I was not wrong, not at all.

In fact, it was worse than I had originally thought.

Not only did Rush foul the name of the media, and the NFL, he claimed afterward that there was no bias at all in anything he said. Yet he has resigned as an ESPN personality on the "NFL Sunday Countdown."

Of course, my first and most perplexing question is this: Why is Rush Limbaugh a commentator on the National Football League in the first place? We might agree he is a big-name personality in terms of national politics. And even though I consider many of his positions neo-Fascist, I recognize that he has a following nationally.

But in football he is illiterate.

When it came to talking about a well-known quarterback with extraordinary skills, such as Donovan McNabb, Limbaugh mixed cluelessness with broad based innuendo about the media and NFL attitudes concerning black quarterbacks. Limbaugh typically posed it as a knowing guess.

Here’s what he said:

"I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go. I thing what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried his team."

Limbaugh tries to assert that the media has either propped up a failing quarterback, or has overlooked his shortcomings to such a degree because ‘the media,’ some amorphous conglomeration of communication outlets, wants to see blacks succeed whether they truly deserve to or not.

Such a sneeringly patronizing assertion also implies that a great liberal media conspiracy is at work, somehow imbued with enough power to keep a failing gridiron hero from being sidelined. Such a media conspiracy, of course, is part and parcel of what Mr. Limbaugh and his right-wing media associates have screamed about for decades, largely to put a smokescreen over their own abuse of truth and free speech.

The truth is that McNabb is one of the best quarterbacks in the league.

He was drafted in 1999, number 2 in the nation.

Since he – and others – came to the team, the team has been a serious contender for the championship. Yet no quarterback, no matter how talented, wins football games alone. The team as a whole wins or loses together.

This year the Philadelphia Eagles, McNabb’s team, has had troubles. McNabb has been trying new passing methods and nobody has the new drills down. Yes, McNabb has had a rough year. But the passing percentage has no relation to his skin color.

To say it has any connection is to preach racism in its most ugly form. You can coat it in nice phrases, as Rush does so well, but racism’s aroma wafts up like a skunk’s defensive aroma.

Now Rush uses one of the oldest tricks of racist rhetoric; he blames the opposition. He says he must be right because the comments have sparked such outrage!

By that rationale, the bigger the lie is, the better.

That piece of advice is straight out of Adolph Hitler’s literature.

McNabb’s reply to Limbaugh’s analysis was this: "It’s sad you’ve got to go to skin color. I thought we were through with that whole deal."

Hmm, much more reasonable response than many victims would deliver. For its own part the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called Limbaugh’s comments, "bigoted and ignorant."

Perhaps a similar note should go to the media people at ESPN, who hired a flamboyant reactionary conservative as a broadcast personality to comment on the National Football Association.

Actually, it may have begun last year, when some media mogul felt the game needed a kick in the pants after the Monday Night Football people chose to put the wry, obtuse and on rare occasion funny personality of Dennis Miller on the broadcast booth team. Miller failed.

But if Limbaugh and Miller were supposed to make football seem more like everybody’s baby by bringing non-football players into the mix, the media people who selected them have probably lost their grip on the game.

While many enjoy football for simply what it is, an action oriented, physical game, it’s not too much of a stretch to note that football can also be an escapist, child’s game that lets grown people with real problems forget them for a few hours and later talk about it for many more hours with total strangers.

To try and make football more of a real-life drama is to ruin it.

Whether that was the objective or not, it was the bottom line of the Limbaugh and Miller: they made a Sunday game into a real life drama from which no one could escape.

Limbaugh was blissfully ignorant of McNabb’s talent, apparently also unaware that one third of the 25 teams in the NFL have black quarterbacks. Somehow, in less than half a season as a commentator, he had used his right-wing broadcaster’s intuition and figured out that the media and the NFL give McNabb more credit than he deserves because he is black. And of course he perceived, as he always does, that the underlying reason why the media is doing this is tied to the great myth of a liberal media conspiracy.

Yes, his comments were against the NFL.

Yes, he also maligned the media, for which he worked.

Yes, he saw anti-discrimination in both the media and NFL and made it clear he didn’t like the way his bosses handled the situation.

This is like listening to a comfortable Southern plantation owner explain, in gentle, well-spoken English phrases, that those "other" people needn’t bother about discrimination, because he has the situation well under control.

This is how high placed bigots always talk.

Everyone should listen, learn and not be fooled. But it’s not easy. Limbaugh is, remember, a professional self-promoter, and like many others, he has found that cleverly playing upon common suspicions, prejudices and ignorance can pay off handsomely. He also learned long ago to wrap such dialogue within fear of a larger, powerful force.

Decades ago Limbaugh and his ilk would have been as likely to imply Communists were somehow involved in promoting black sports stars, but today that’s clearly ludicrous – although it wasn’t only a half century ago – so now the idea of some liberal media that operates in a united, monolithic manner, has been tapped to be the next focus of fear.

Unfortunately, as I discovered walking through the newsroom, it’s possible to be working in the very heart of the great media beast and become infected with the idea that the industry as a whole is capable of moving a conspiratorial agenda, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Apparently in some cases it’s possible to disassociate one’s own experiences in favor of the loud voice crying wolf, thereby intellectually exchanging the ancient and common newsperson’s refrain, ‘Prove it to me,’ for a quiet belief that some media outlets and journalists are writing stories and making comments based not on facts but on an agenda driven by others, some mysterious hidden bosses.

My friend and fellow editor wasn’t entirely correct when she said we could disagree and still be friends. We will of course remain office friends, which is what we always were, but the chance that we might ever become personal friends would now require crossing a professional gap that now exists between us, a gap created by Rush Limbaugh’s ability to insinuate unfounded suspicion into the public dialogue while simultaneously delegitimizing the very free media that gives him a podium. In the end, he lessens us all.