There didn't really seem to be a reason to memorialize Rush Limbaugh - don't speak ill of the dead and all that - but Eric Boehlert makes a point I share: there won't be any more Rush Limbaughs:
"Once a leading platform for popularizing conservative candidates and policies, talk radio is on the verge of becoming background noise, drowned out by a cacophony of voices on podcasts, cable TV and social media," the Washington Post reported this year.
The pandemic also hit talk radio hard. "2020 is the year that in-car AM/FM radio has hit the proverbial iceberg," Radio World reported. "The COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns severely curtailed regular commuting journeys, where much of consumers’ radio-listening originates."
The right-wing talk format also skews way too old. "We're at the sea-change moment," Radio America's Mike Paradiso recently told Axios. "At some point, the stations need to make a shift to bring in younger listeners."
AM Radio was slowly dying when Rush moved into talk radio in the mid eighties, and while he stanched the bleeding for about 10 years, as Boehlert and his sources note, the demographics got away from even him. Where broadcast deregulation (from ending the Fairness Doctrine to dropping ownership limits to opening up cable and broadband) gave Rush an opening, those very changes also spelled his, and the genre's, demise: there are too many choices, and too little spark remains, to recreate the dominance of a singular voice as Rush had and did.
Moreover, that's how Rush wanted it. No one did more to clear the field and salt the ground than Rush himself: hyper competitive, hateful to the point of spitefulness, Rush didn't just trample challengers, he obliterated the possibility of even trying. He was vicious, on air, to anyone who dared come for him, and behind the scenes he bigfooted any attempt to challenge him, going so far as to jump stations in major markets if he felt it would increase his dominance (or, more importantly, his paycheck). Sean Hannity gave up trying; others, like Laura Ingraham, paid the price and left the business almost all together (until Ingraham limped her way into Fox's 10pm slot, she'd been a nonstarter in both TV and radio). Rush's show was a solo operation - especially when he decamped from WABC in New York and set up his own quasi network in Florida, whose sole purpose was to feed his daily 3 hours. He trained no successor. He encouraged no supporting talent. His network didn't even offer a complimentary show to extend his reach. No the Rush show was just that... The Rush show. And he took it with him as he left.
So who can replace him? Boehlert mentions new shows being shopped by Dana Loesch and Dan Bongino; I laugh at both. Loesch, at least, is a proven talk radio quantity - but that's the point: any known radio voice is already known to not be able to dominate 12-3 as Rush did. Bongino is largely a joke - he lacks (I know, I know, but stay with me) even a tenth of Rush's actual warmth and respect for the genre. Hannity? He's the star that remains, but his appeal was always weaker. Mark Levin? Fuggedaboutit.
There will, of course, be skeptics. People who think of Rush as all purpose demagogue, and the right is just ready to plug and play any replacement... say, Tucker Carlson. That, really, is to misunderstand what Rush dominated, how he did it, and why. Carlson does, yes, sit in the same catbird seat as Bill O'Reilly and enjoys, I'd argue a dominance on par or slightly higher than Bill's: an agenda setter, sure, but mostly the lead presence to harangue naysayers and enemies into submission. Rush was something else. At his height, he didn't just set the tone or start the conversation - he completely up ended the conservative agenda, and forced the right to heel the madding crowd. Rush's real skill, after all, was how finely attuned he was to his audience; he could carefully recalibrate almost any point, if callers proved it unpopular. He did no interviews, asked no experts, flew on nothing but his own opinions and the words of his listeners. No one, really, has shown themselves anywhere near able to do what he did at the scale he did it.
And that, in part, is where we should perhaps honor his actual skill: Rush loved talk radio, lived it, breathed it. He mastered the genre like no one before... or indeed, since. He wasn't just good at it. He was masterful. And that, ultimately, is why we will never see anything quite like it again. Yes, the circumstances that fueled his rise are gone... but mostly, so is he. There was always a local radio version of Rush in nearly every major market: Howie Carr, after all, still reliably delivers it, day after numbing day. Rush was the one who took it national, who swung for the fences and played for The Show. And then he took his bat and knee capped anyone who dared come near him.
There will be blowhards. There will be demagogues. We will, for however much longer, be saddled with Tucker and Hannity and all the others (and here's to Greg Gutfeld, who proves that there will never be a Rush of late night comedy either). There will not, though, be a singular player in the field dominating it the way Rush did, for anything like the period when he did - it's worth observing, after all, that neither his ratings or his reach were anything like what they'd been, either during the Trump years or at his death. Indeed, Trump is the playing out of Rush's dominance for the farce it was - cynical blowhards have their place, but it's not as the head of national government. The world moved on, even Rush knew that. And there is no mantle to take up, no crown to make one's own. Talk radio without Rush is just the sad backwater it was doomed to become all along, and standing tall amongst the remaining midgets won't make you the right's newest star. There won't be another Rush. And isn't one enough?
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