November 8, 2006
I. F. Stone vs. Rush Limbaugh Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST For the record, John Steele Gordon is wrong to equate Josh Marshall’s website, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. He would like readers to assume that both Marshall and Limbaugh are partisans whose first allegiance is to their political ideology, and who are thus equally sloppy in presenting news and analysis. Not really true. Interesting, Josh Marshall earned a Ph.D. in American history at Brown University (we overlapped as graduate students there and have some friends in common, but we don’t know each other well), where he worked with Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America. In fact, I recommend Josh’s site to our readers from time to time because he often tries to provide some historical perspective on current events. Marshall also writes regularly for Time magazine and The Hill, two respected nonpartisan news outlets, and has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Finally, his website contains scrupulous documentation of the stories it posts. Mr. Gordon should check it out. He might learn a little something.
By contrast, Rush Limbaugh completed one year at Southeast Missouri State University before dropping out of college altogether. Nothing wrong with that. College isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for being a talk-radio show host. But let’s not fool ourselves into equating his intellectual and research credentials with Marshall’s. Moreover, Limbaugh has not, to the best of my knowledge, produced any serious studies of American politics and culture.
While Mr. Gordon chides me for bringing politics to a history website, I’d remind him that I almost always try to tie my current-day observations to the past, which is more than I can say for his frequent antiliberal screeds, which have little or no discernible connection to history. There’s a word for this. I believe it’s “hypocrisy.”
Let me try, then, to tie this conversation back to history by suggesting that Josh Marshall’s blog is a latter-day variation on the underground newspaper, a journalistic tradition that stretches back at least as far as William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist publication, The Liberator, and in a more recent incarnation, to I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Marshall has tapped the Internet to modernize the institution of independent journalism. Insofar as he’s managed to help shape the public debate on any number of matters (as did Garrison and Stone), he’s proven that this remains an important institution, particularly in these days of media consolidation and declining newspaper readership.
Rush Limbaugh, by contrast, strikes me as a latter-day equivalent of Father Coughlin, the radio priest who galvanized millions of unhappy listeners against FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. (Coughlin began his radio career as a Roosevelt supporter but soon changed his stripes.) Right-wing shock-talk can’t claim roots as long as those of independent journalism or underground newspapers, because commercial radio has only been around since about 1920. Still, that’s a long time, and Limbaugh is working in a rich tradition.
Ultimately, just as there’s no comparison between I. F. Stone and Father Coughlin, there’s no comparison between Josh Marshall and Rush Limbaugh. They work in different media, they apply entirely different standards of intellectual rigor, documentation, and research (Marshall works like a scholar, Limbaugh like an entertainer), and they have entirely different agendas.
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