The Death Of Limbaugh And The 2020 Moral Panic

I've frequently discussed the 2020 dumpster fire here as a "moral panic", an upheaval in public opinion similar to the Salem witch trials or the day-care Satanism wave of the 1980s, a widespread fear that some ill-defined evil threatens the well-being of society. Observers suggest that moral panics stem from underlying social insecurity, with particular issues and "devils" serving only as what an Aristotelian would call efficient or proximate causes, not the underlying reason.

I'm now thinking that the single event that drove the whole 2020 moral panic, before the COVID lockdowns, before the George Floyd riots, was Rush Limbaugh's announcement of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Let me make it plain that, while I often found Limbaugh entertaining, I was never a dittohead, and I think in recent years he'd lost his sharp satirical edge, though he almost never had three hours of material to fill a three-hour show, and it was often padded with predictable bloviation.

But I had a sudden moment of epiphany the other night as I watched a TV program on, of all things, Swanson's TV Dinners. One of the analysts made a telling point, that TV Dinners became enormously popular at a time when there were effectively three TV networks that created a cultural consensus, which included the enormous cultural change of people watching television at dinner hour in the family room, eating frozen pre-prepared food off "TV tables". This trend took off like a rocket in the mid to late 1950s, and by 1968, Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

This is yet another of the remarks LBJ may or may not have uttered, but reflect a perception of cultural trends that suggests that if he didn't say them, he should have. Walter Cronkite was a dinner-hour TV Dinner talking head that somehow reflected a single national consensus, driven by a de facto single national media.

The national media figure who began to undermine that 30-year media consensus in the late 1980s was Rush Limbaugh. By 2009, public exchanges between Limbaugh and Barack Obama cemented Limbaugh's stature, as in presidential remarks equivalent to LBJ's, Obama said, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," The Guardian at the link noted,

He is the highlight of the rural American lunch hour, and his strong, confident voice can be heard in mechanic's shops, petrol stations and barbershops every day. He is – as he claims – an excellent broadcaster, a shameless and skilful self-promoter and a mover and shaker among the conservative elite.

Note the reference to Limbaugh suggesting, as with Cronkite, a dominant presence at mealtimes and in US culture, as well as a presidential acknowedgement of each figure's importance.

But it's also now recognized that Limbaugh had an impact on media equivalent to the TV Dinner's impact on American eating habits. According to the Poynter Institute,

Rush Limbaugh was more than a talk radio host. He was a key element in the development of the highly partisan journalism and other media that envelop us today.

Limbaugh’s talk radio program was not possible until the Federal Communications Commission relaxed the fairness doctrine. That policy, which began in 1949, was rooted in the idea that radio and TV stations were “public trustees” and as such should serve the entire nation and on the local level serve the communities to which they were licensed. The doctrine required them to air competing views on important issues. The idea was for broadcasters not to take sides.

. . . Along came President Ronald Reagan who, like other conservatives, didn’t like the fairness doctrine. The feeling was that news media lean liberal and the marketplace should determine content. With the support of FCC Commissioner Mark S. Fowler, the commission announced in 1987 that the government would no longer enforce the fairness doctrine. The commission reasoned that with the rise of cable television there were lots of viewpoints available to the public that did not exist when only print and over-the-air broadcasting were the only conduits to the public.

Now of course, pace LBJ, Walter Cronkite wasn't middle American at all. Cronkite's style was stentorian, patrician, Episcopalian, Brooks Brothers. Limbaugh was irreverent, Evangelical, a late-blooming college dropout, former disc jockey and low-level football flack who'd bucked his family tradition of becoming a lawyer. Limbaugh was the middle American, not Cronkite.

When Cronkite met his reward, nobody much cared, he was part of a bygone age by then, predeceased by the likes of John Cameron Swayze, Douglas Edwards, and Chet Huntley. They hadn't changed anything much, since Americans kept watching the nightly news over their TV dinners even as the talking heads changed -- but the talking heads were saying what they were told to say anyhow, which didn't change over that time.

The problem with Limbaugh was that he changed a great deal, and whether he passed away didn't cancel those changes out. He was an early pioneer of independent media, and he simply created a whole new market. When he announced his cancer diagnosis and Trump awarded him the Medal of Freedom during a State of the Union, the lizard people simply woke up and realized that, attack Limbaugh as they might, he'd be gone soon enough, as he was, but he was the guy who'd squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube, and they weren't going to be able to push it back in. He'd given the plebs a voice, not lectured them as their better.

This is the source of the elites' panic and desperation. The nodes of the panic, masks and social distance, riots by the urban underclass threatened by disappearance of the destructive policies that sustain it, and the corporate attempts to restrict speech, are all results of the social uncertainty created by media no longer under elites' complete control.