If we are going to assess blame here, let's blame those who put Rush on the air and who allow him (and all his clones) to do their "act." There was a time when the industry had standards. Rush lies, presents false or unfounded "information," engages in personal attacks. His bosses at Bain Channel let him. The stations which carry his show let him. Rush was able to operate in the biz successfully when there were still standards. OK, he got fired a lot. Who didn't? But he did show himself capable of self-restraint. Now, he's like a spoiled brat who thinks he's wonderful and knows he can get away with anything.
I wonder what the ditto-heads here would be saying about Rush's tactics if he were shilling for the DNC instead.
Make no mistake about it: The reason Limbaugh and his clones are permitted to violate the public trust by knowingly misrepresenting fact for ideological reasons, is shear laziness and a lack of creativity on the part of talk programmers.
The path of least resistance dictates that programmers just let those hosts do what they do, because in recent years they've had ratings success playing to the extreme right. Granted, stations had success before that, but with the advent of Limbaugh (and clones) the copycat mentality took hold in programming and stations systematically hired lots more of them, chasing "normal" listeners away in the process, thus creating a niche that had to be further catered to for survival. In essence, they created their own problem. To this day, maybe due to a lack of historical knowledge in the evolution of the format over the last 25 years, many connected to the talk format don't even realize how this runaway train got started.
To be honest, if I was a talk programmer and I heard my hosts recklessly misinforming the public the way talkradio hosts do these days, I would have a difficult time not hauling their arses into the office for a serious talk about their future with the station. I really do wonder how many of these lazy and shortsighted programmers can live with themselves. They'll claim it's just entertainment, but generally speaking, when someone goes to a movie or the circus, they know it's about entertainment. When someone turns on a newstalk station and hears a voice talking about issues, they think of it as news, not entertainment.
The credibility that many heritage newstalk stations built over the past 80 years has been cashed in on and desecrated. They sold out for the sake of pleasing a niche audience that is not being replaced demographically. Due to the shortsightedness of many throughout the ranks of the programming and financial hierarchy, a climate has been created where this problem will not be fixed and radio will continue to grow in it's irrelevancy.
I'm not a conservative or a liberal and I have listened to talk since my late teens. I now listen to less talkradio than ever before---and not because I'm going to other mediums for it. If you don't see a problem with that, then you're part of the problem. The extreme ideological listeners were always there, but pandering to them is only accelerating the loss of everyone else.
