Lumping Limbaugh and Stern together reflects the limited thinking of the mainstream media.
Greg Corombos and I taped yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast shortly after the news broke of Rush Limbaugh’ death, and one of the points I remembered was the November 1, 1993, Time magazine cover that caricatured Limbaugh and Howard Stern as twin giants breathing fire into a microphone, under the headline, “Voice of America?”
Few fans of either man were particularly pleased by the cover, and neither broadcasting giant liked being compared to the other. Looking back, Time’s cover was a useful indicator of how little the mainstream media understood Limbaugh or his appeal. (Or how little they understood Stern’s, for that matter.)
The point is not whether you liked both Limbaugh and Stern, hated both, or liked one and not the other. The point is that Limbaugh and Stern were playing pretty starkly different “games” from the start and there really wasn’t a strong argument that these two men are “two sides of the same coin,” or mirror reflections, or mirror opposites. The Venn Diagram of their listeners would have some overlap, but not much. This piece written by James Warren at the time observed that Stern’s program was mostly a phenomenon in the New York and Los Angeles markets in 1993.
I suppose you can argue that both Stern and Limbaugh were “new” — the kind of overnight successes that are built after more than a decade of toiling in relative obscurity in the profession — and threatening to the established media order that Time magazine represented. And on the most superficial level, they were both “outrageous” and “controversial” — but the tone and content and style couldn’t have been more different; they outraged different sectors of American society. Most of Hollywood had no objection to Stern’s off-color and body-part-obsessed humor, but they couldn’t abide Limbaugh using the term “Feminazis.” Rush had a lot of Christian listeners who could laugh off his quip, “I love the women’s movement, especially when walking behind it,” but who saw Stern’s program as near-pornographic trash.
The Time cover piece by Kurt Andersen at least recognized and spotlighted some ludicrous hypocrisy:
One evening last week at the grand Manhattan home of former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher and his wife Georgette, chat among the guests, who included eminence grise Pete Peterson and Sally Jessy Raphael, variously covered Somalia and Bosnia — and, eventually, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Another guest, the woman who edits both Limbaugh and Stern (as well as Mrs. Mosbacher and Beavis and Butt-head) for Pocket Books, came under attack for publishing Stern’s unseemliness. His book, Private Parts, in addition to autobiographical particulars and his not-exactly-progressive views on social issues, flaunts his low-down obsession with sexuality. “You should be ashamed,” said a very powerful entertainment executive who has made millions of dollars producing smutty, antisocial television and movies. “Howard Stern is a pornographer!” another prominent diner screeched. Still another predicted Stern’s book would be a flop, since nobody but semiliterate white trash listens to him.
Lumping Limbaugh and Stern together reflects the limited thinking of the mainstream media of that era. But perhaps there was a common thread that the article missed. The two radio giants had a staff, but no editors, other than the FCC’s efforts to rein in Stern. No large institutions held authority over them; they didn’t answer to a board of directors or investors. They quickly made fortunes and didn’t need the money; they could walk away from their careers at any point if it became too much of a hassle. They became one-man institutions — eventually followed by the likes of Matt Drudge and Joe Rogan.
Their paths since that article illuminate that the two men defined success differently. Stern certainly wasn’t apolitical, and did run for governor in 1994 as a Libertarian, but withdrew from the race after refusing to fill out financial disclosure forms, contending he had already revealed enough about his life on air. He endorsed George Pataki, and his interest in politics waned. As Bruce Bawer laid out in City Journal last year, Stern gradually morphed into part of the Hollywood establishment. He’s now the kind of dangerous, outrageous, shameless provocateur NBC can trust to safely sit as a judge on America’s Got Talent.
Limbaugh intermittently stepped into the larger media establishment — his short-lived television show, a very brief run as a commentator on ESPN, some funny vocal cameos on Family Guy. But in the end, Rush Limbaugh had created his own world through radio and didn’t need to branch out. He didn’t need any newer listeners or broader appeal, or greater approval, and never sought it.
That November 1993 article asked, “Will they be hectoring and outraging all over the airwaves a decade from now?” and concluded, “Stern is smart enough to think he won’t be. Limbaugh probably will be unless he really triumphs and a Reaganite Republican such as Bill Bennett is elected President.” Limbaugh and Stern were both still thriving in 2003 — as well as in 2013, and up until this past year in Limbaugh’s case.
Finally that Time article concluded with an early indicator of censoriousness that would advance in the following generation: “that 34 percent of Americans (and 48 percent of Democrats) think the government should not allow Rush to make fun of the Clintons on the air, according to the TIME/CNN poll, is more worrisome than Stern or Limbaugh will ever be.”