Why Rush wins

Byron York:

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“The real practical effect of the Fairness Doctrine was to shut down all controversial programming, because management would not deal with complaints,” Limbaugh told me. “So when you did listen to talk shows on the radio, they were dull and boring and horrible.”

Of course, Limbaugh did occasionally have his troubles with the Doctrine and sometimes found himself forced to share the air with community leaders who objected to something he had said. That made him unhappy, but not because he was opposed to differing viewpoints. It was because he was opposed to bad radio. “The problem with that is that radio is a business,” he explained. “You bring in people who are not broadcast professionals and give them unchallenged time…You try to make it as stimulating as possible, but…” Well, it wasn’t very stimulating.

You could almost hear Limbaugh’s teeth grinding as he discussed putting on a program that was “dull and boring and horrible.” He just can’t do it. And that is why Rush is Rush. He is deeply, deeply offended by the prospect of boring his listeners. And he has worked for years to develop his rather remarkable talent of keeping them interested for three hours a day, five days a week — all by himself.

The bottom line isn’t really about politics. It’s about radio. If Limbaugh were a liberal, we’d probably be talking about why liberals dominate talk radio. So you can talk about ownership and diversity all you want. But the bottom line is that Limbaugh simply knows radio, and what works on radio, better than anyone else in the world. That’s why he wins.

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Victor Davis Hanson also looks at the whining over the "fairness doctrine."

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Talk radio is as much entertainment as political opinion. It lives or dies by ratings. Those who master the genre -- with off-the-wall jokes, mimicry, satire and bombast --prosper and get their political message across. Those who can't, don't.

Had liberal talk show hosts of the past, like an Al Franken, Jerry Brown or Mario Cuomo, won far more listeners than Rush Limbaugh, one suspects that Sen. Feinstein would see little need for new laws. And we would probably now be spared the present sour-grapes cries about fairness.

The government is already in the broadcasting business with National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. Despite conservative whining about the leftwing biases of these two institutions, fortunately no one has succeeded in having their broadcasts monitored or in demanding equal time on them for all views.

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Rush used to say that he was equal time to counteract the liberal bias in other broadcast such as the networks and NPR. One of the problems with this debate is that liberals are so blind to the bias of there supporters.

What is really at issue here is that liberals want to suppress the views of their opponents and the fairness doctrine is just a means of doing so. It is like the speech codes on campus where competing ideas are not permitted because they offend someone, but free speech is about being able to offend anyone including liberals.