The Wall Street Journal on Big Fat Idiots by M.P. Prabhakaran

The resolution passed by the U.S. Senate on September 16, 2003 to repeal the rules adopted in June by the Federal Communications Commission is a blow to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal had been campaigning hard to block its passage.

It is also a stinging rebuke to the commission’s chairman, Michael K. Powell, who was the architect of those retrogressive rules. The rules would make it easier for the biggest media companies in the country to grow bigger at the expense of small ones. Powell, who is a Republican, may be feeling humiliated for one more reason: the Senate that passed the resolution to abrogate the rules that are close to his heart is Republican-controlled.

In a September 12 editorial entitled “The Stop Rush Campaign,” The Wall Street Journal wondered why some Republican senators were “helping their political opponents muzzle the likes of Rush Limbaugh.” It can stop wondering now. Not all Republicans are as primitive in thinking as the paper’s editorial writers are. The passage of the resolution was made possible because of the support it received from 12 of them. True, some of them are conservative, but not as paleolithic as the Journal’s editorial page is.

The editorial is being stupid when it says that the Senate resolution, which seeks to maintain the existing restrictions on the countries’ media conglomerates (the FCC’s June decision would remove those restrictions), was meant to “muzzle the likes of Rush Limbaugh.” As one reads on it becomes clear who “the likes of Rush Limbaugh” are. They are the arrogant, conceited, right-wing radio broadcasters who currently dominate the county’s airwaves and media emperor Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Doesn't the Journal know that the restrictions apply equally to ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, which it never tires of calling liberal? Also, one fails to understand the logic behind this admonition in the editorial: “If Republicans can't rally behind their President on something so clearly in their own interest, they deserve to suffer the bias of Dan Rather [of CBS] and Katie Couric [of NBC].” If the paper finds Dan Rather and Katie Couric biased, it should be supporting the Senate resolution that abrogates the FCC rules, not the FCC rules that would allow further expansion of the media empires Rather and Couric work for.

That makes one suspect that the Journal’s real concern is what it says in the subtitle to the editorial: “Limbaugh and Fox are the real targets on broadcast ownership.” We'll tackle Fox in a moment. Let’s first get Limbaugh out of the way.

This is what the editorial says about him: “The most popular of them all [of all talk radio hosts] is Rush Limbaugh, no doubt because of his humor and optimism, with 20 million listeners a week.”

The Journal may see humor and optimism in Limbaugh’s radio talk. But others see in it sensationalism, obnoxiousness, pomposity and lies. Things sell well in America if they come coated with patriotism. That’s how President Bush and his sycophantic supporters sold the idea to invade Iraq. And that explains the largeness of the audience for Limbaugh and others who, “to the horror of the political left, … have prospered on radio,” as the editorial puts it.

In his 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken does a thorough job of exposing Limbaugh not only as a big fat idiot but also as a distorter of facts. (The expression “big fat idiot” is to be taken metaphorically, not literally as Jean Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under the Reagan administration, does in her review of the book in The New York Times.) If anyone thinks that Franken’s 1996 expose is not thorough enough, he or she may want to read his latest book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Apart from Limbaugh and a few other neo- and paleocon talk radio hosts, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Fox News figure prominently in Franken’s list of “Lying Liars.”

Fox may want to consider using the Journal’s September 12 editorial in its next promotion campaign. It is hard to write an ad copy more glowing than this: “The [Fox] cable [news] channel has blown past CNN in the ratings in just seven years, and its different take on the news [emphasis added] drives liberals up the wall. So obsessed are they with Fox that Al Gore and friends are trying to finance their own liberal cable network.” The editorial, however, omits an important point: that liberals are driven up the wall only when Fox’s “different take on the news” takes the form of lies Al Franken listed in his book.

It is a fact known to all that “big fat idiots” in the Fourth Estate become bigger and fatter by gobbling up the small fry around. Media emperors like Rupert Murdoch don’t need any assistance from government in their media-acquiring forays into newer and newer territories. The owners of small small-town newspapers and radio and TV stations do. But then, the idea of government’s helping the underprivileged in society has liberal connotations. Anything that is even remotely associated with liberalism drives The Wall Street Journal up the wall, to throw back at it its own phrase.

The Senate vote showed that not all its Republican members were swayed by the paper’s campaign on behalf of the media behemoths in the country. The September 12 editorial even tried a cheap warning on them that “standing up for free-market principles and deregulation is one reason they came to Washington in the first place.” Some of them pooh-poohed the warning and voted their conscience. In doing so, they were sending a message to the Journal that when free-market competition threatens to destroy the disadvantaged, the government has a responsibility to intervene as an impartial umpire. Will President Bush, who has been threatening to veto the resolution, pay heed to the message?

I just finished reading the article. It is a pleasure to read your work. While I have very few political views, I do agree that Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. I also enjoyed the piece, "Yoga On Copacabana."

I was surprised and gladdened when I first read that the Senate shot down the FCC rules that would allow mega-media giants to gobble up more news outlets. I had expected the proposed rules to sail through the Republican-controlled Senate, as they are not the kind of issues that the voters pay attention to.