Friday February 27, 2004

SPEAKING POWER TO TRUTH. Here's a transcript of Rush Limbaugh talking to some kid about Clear Channel. The kid's pissed that CC has a virtual monopoly on airtime and that his own band has no chance with its stations because their DJs are told to play only approved playlists. Limbaugh says that when he was a DJ, he was told what to play, too.

At this point I halfway expected Rush to commiserate with the kid, but instead he explains that this is how things were, are, will be and, to coin a phrase, are supposed to be:

...it's not the radio stations that are giving you problems although it is a challenge for you, it's the music business at large...

I know you're 16 and you're bright. There's so many lessons here. Economics is one, specific business application is another. First thing I'd like to say, why does nobody complain about the number of Wal-Marts? I mean Kmart complains about it, but there aren't any government hearings...

Clear Channel owns a lot of radio stations, I can tell you they're not all music stations, they don't all play the same music... There's a little bit more autonomy at these Clear Channel stations than people understand. I happen to know this because my show airs on a number of them...

Then he talks about how, when he was a DJ, music companies treated stations "as a bunch of dirt sewers" and "the musicians themselves, their noses were straight up in the air and their heads were in the clouds and they wouldn't deign to walk into a radio station... Now all of a sudden, I'm listening to all these musicians complain about Clear Channel. Why, it's turned out that these musicians are being forced to admit publicly what they need."

I must be getting soft -- fancy even imagining that Limbaugh would ever side with the powerless against the powerful! The kid complains that he's locked out of a living by a virtual monopoly. A sympathetic soul might have told him about Vin Scelsa, about the remaining independent college stations, about satellite and internet stations, etc. Limbaugh instead tells him: isn't it great that now the power is on my side?
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