Adventures in sourcing:
1. Americablog reports that 140 advertisers have dropped Limbaugh.
2. Americablog sources the story back to Greg Sargent's Plum Line column in The Washington Post.
3. Plum Line leads with, "Think Progress gets its hands on an internal memo from Premiere Radio Networks..."
4. So off to Think Progress, which bills its story as "exclusive": "ThinkProgress has obtained an internal memo from Premiere Radio Networks listing 96 national companies that have “specifically asked” their advertisments not be played during the Rush Limbaugh Show."
5. Think Progress got the story from Radio-Info.com, which posted it this past weekend. Apparently Radio-Info got it from the website of the Traffic Directors Guild of America, where it was posted and then taken down.
6. Since The Internet Is Forever, Think Progress jumped back in and captured a snapshot of TDGA's webpage of March 9, which has the Premiere Networks memo up.
And thus do matters stand.
Oh, BTW: Stanley Fish has a nicely provocative meditation on the current messhall fracas over who's meaner to women, Left or Right?:
...If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.
I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.
_________________
* Limbaugh was in 1995's Forget Paris with Cathy Moriarty, who played opposite Bacon in Digging to China in 1998. So there.
1. Americablog reports that 140 advertisers have dropped Limbaugh.
2. Americablog sources the story back to Greg Sargent's Plum Line column in The Washington Post.
3. Plum Line leads with, "Think Progress gets its hands on an internal memo from Premiere Radio Networks..."
4. So off to Think Progress, which bills its story as "exclusive": "ThinkProgress has obtained an internal memo from Premiere Radio Networks listing 96 national companies that have “specifically asked” their advertisments not be played during the Rush Limbaugh Show."
5. Think Progress got the story from Radio-Info.com, which posted it this past weekend. Apparently Radio-Info got it from the website of the Traffic Directors Guild of America, where it was posted and then taken down.
6. Since The Internet Is Forever, Think Progress jumped back in and captured a snapshot of TDGA's webpage of March 9, which has the Premiere Networks memo up.
And thus do matters stand.
Oh, BTW: Stanley Fish has a nicely provocative meditation on the current messhall fracas over who's meaner to women, Left or Right?:
...If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.
I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.
_________________
* Limbaugh was in 1995's Forget Paris with Cathy Moriarty, who played opposite Bacon in Digging to China in 1998. So there.
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