Jonathan Taplin Responds To Limbaughs Denial of Right Wing Media Conspiracy

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April 30 — In response to Rush Limbaugh’s comments yesterday on his radio show and text posted on his Web site, Jonathan Taplin, President of Intertainer, has responded with the following comments:

   Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh spent considerable energy on his radio show and

   his web-site promoting the idea that he and Newt Gingrich have not worked

   together to create a right wing radio power.  Limbaugh’s argument, quite

   frankly, is laughable. He uses the typical demagogue technique of picking

   at small facts to dismiss large truths.

Limbaugh has worked hand in glove with Gingrich since the early eighties.
He uses the fact that Clear Channel did not actually take control of Premiere Radio Networks and buy out Limbaugh’s EIB until the late nineties as proof that he did not work with Clear Channel in the eighties. The facts are undeniable that Limbaugh was a cheerleader for eliminating the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980’s, not to mention that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was pushed through Congress by Gingrich as part of his Republican Revolution. These two actions made possible the Right wing radio takeover we are now experiencing.

As I cited in my FCC testimony, the average American town has 80 hours a week of right wing talk radio and zero hours a week of Democratic or liberal talk radio. Clear Channel is the main purveyor of this trend and could not exist if the Fairness Doctrine had not been killed by Ronald
Reagan’s FCC in 1987.

I would also like to remind Mr. Limbaugh that he worked tirelessly with Newt Gingrich to push the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Freedom Act, which prevented private citizens from suing corporate officers for making false statements about their financial situation.
Although the disaster of the abuse of the deregulated Savings and Loan industry was still only a few years in the past, the memory of Republican lawmakers was short, and they overrode a Clinton veto. During the debate, Democrat John Dingell remarked to Gingrich, “Mr. Speaker, this bill is a
scandalous piece of legislation. It sanctifies the most outrageous kind of fraud and misbehavior imaginable. It is a bill that would be beloved by Mike Milken, Ivan Boesky and Charles Keating.”

Within four years Dingell would be sadly proven right as the Private Securities Litigation Freedom Act led directly to the abuses of investor trust by Companies like Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Adelphia and many others.
Shielded by the “Safe Harbor” status granted them by the law, executives created sham transactions, touted worthless securities and led to the loss of $7 trillion dollars from investor accounts. Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Gingrich somehow want the public to forget. But we won’t.

Web site: http://www.intertainer.com/

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