HuffPost passes off hate piece as Rush Limbaugh obit, other media follow suit
February 17, 2021
Rush Limbaugh, one of the most influential voices in the history of conservative talk radio, died Wednesday following a year-long battle with lung cancer. HuffPost immediately jumped at the opportunity to run this headline: “Rush Limbaugh, Bigoted King of Talk Radio, Dies at 70.”
This is @letsgomathias and @nickrobinsearly's obituary for Rush Limbaugh in @HuffPost: https://t.co/7A8M3P9d71 pic.twitter.com/s3q3BMMDKC
— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) February 17, 2021
The “obituary”, which reads more like a hateful tirade, goes on to claim that Limbaugh “saturated America’s airwaves with cruelty bigotries, lies and conspiracy theories for over three decades.”
Figureheads in the mainstream media have long hated Limbaugh, especially due to his close relationship with President Trump. During the State of the Union last year, Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
At the time, NBC described the award as “fitting” because “Limbaugh’s boorish persona and his belief in white, male cultural centrality paved the way for the political rise of the bombastic performer currently sitting in the Oval Office.”
Even now, after his death, the media still can’t help but pile on their hatred of Limbaugh. NBC ran with this as the subhead for his obituary: “The Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree outraged critics with his long history of sexist, homophobic and racist remarks.”
NowThis reported that “[d]uring his decades-long media career, he used his platform to promote racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and conspiracy theories.”
The Washington Post, which famously described ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” upon his death, covered Limbaugh as a man who “deployed comic bombast and relentless bashing of liberals, feminists and environmentalists to become a cultural phenomenon and lead the Republican Party into a politics of anger and obstruction.”
All of this is but a small sampling of the hateful rhetoric that’s making its way across mainstream news outlets Wednesday.