Our outrageous media created the Tea Party

How "melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration and mockery" became the dominant tone on cable and talk radio

JEFFREY M. BERRY AND SARAH SOBIERAJ

Sandra Fluke’s statement on behalf of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice during a House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee in February 2012 placed her in the center of a firestorm. Her public advocacy for insurance coverage of contraceptives resulted in an extended series of personal attacks from radio personality Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s three-day tirade began on February 29, when he offered demeaning characterizations of Fluke, including that she “wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.” Although this suggests that Fluke proposed that tax revenues be used to pay for contraceptives, her actual position was that contraception should be covered by the student-funded health insurance in place, which was not subsidized by the (Catholic) university or the government.

The next day Limbaugh was even more aggressive, revisiting his prostitution analogy and adding new fuel to the fire remarking, “Ms. Fluke, have you ever heard of not having sex? Have you ever heard of not having sex so often?” Over the course of the broadcast he said that Fluke was having so much sex that it was “amazing” that she could still walk, questioned her morality, suggested that her life had no purpose, commented that she had no self-control or personal responsibility, and said he would have stayed away from someone like her when he was in school because they might carry sexually transmitted diseases. He also pretended to be Fluke, using a crybaby voice to suggest she was an entitled whiner. Perhaps most crudely, he suggested, “So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch … if we’re going to have a part in this, then we want something in return, Ms. Fluke, and that would be the videos of all this sex posted online so we can see what we are getting for our money.” On the March 2 show, Limbaugh repeated variations on the statement that she was having “so much sex that she can’t afford it” at roughly 10 separate points in the broadcast, erroneously indicating more than once that this information came from Fluke’s testimony in front of the committee, although Fluke did not comment on her sex life in her statement.

Limbaugh’s commentary about Fluke produced the most dramatic outcry against the show in its 25-year history. Criticism came from all quarters: Liberal media watchdog group Media Matters organized a social media campaign lobbying Limbaugh advertisers to drop his program. Advocacy groups, particularly women’s rights organizations, also took action. The National Organization for Women called for Clear Channel Communications, the corporate parent of the Rush Limbaugh Show, to drop the program. Seventy-five Democratic members of Congress signed a letter to House Speaker John Boehner urging him to condemn Limbaugh’s behavior, and President Barack Obama called Fluke to express his personal support. Republican leaders who were asked to comment chose their remarks gingerly; presidential candidate Mitt Romney said merely, “it’s not the language I would have used.”

Under pressure from advertisers who were dropping the show, Limbaugh made a half-hearted apology to Fluke on his March 6 broadcast, expressing regret over his use of “those two words to describe her” (presumably slut and prostitute), but he also continued to offer criticism of Fluke and of the contraception policy she endorsed. The apology did not stem the tide; in a little more than a week Limbaugh lost more than 50 advertisers. He publicly claimed the loss was not hurting business, “That’s like losing a couple of french fries in the container when it’s delivered to you in the drive thru. You don’t even notice it.” The long-term impact on Limbaugh’s advertising revenue remains to be seen, but it is clear that the Fluke controversy amounted to free publicity for the program and further solidified his standing with his conservative audience.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/07/our_outrageous_media_created_the_tea_party/