Remembering Rush Limbaugh, Conservative Media’s Greatest Icon
A pioneer and philanthropist who invented a format and changed media
On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh’s wife Kathryn announced that he had died after a battle with lung cancer.
Tributes and condolences poured in from all spheres of Republican politics Wednesday. If George W. Bush and Donald Trump can’t agree on each other, they can at least agree on Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh was a husband, a renowned philanthropist, and the single most important figure on the American right since Ronald Reagan.
Rush Limbaugh transformed the media landscape, and with 15 million weekly listeners, he became the most influential voice in conservative politics.
Younger observers of politics take for granted a media ecosystem where Fox News is the number one cable news channel and Ben Shapiro has one of the country’s five most downloaded podcasts. At one point, outside of a smattering of magazines, all right-of-center commentary was filtered through legacy media companies with a liberal bent like The New York Times or NBC. Rush Limbaugh single-handedly shattered that world and changed media forever.
There was no editing, no looking over your shoulder, and no hand-wringing over what might ruffle feathers. Listeners got the raw, unadulterated voice they didn’t even know they had been missing, and soon enough, millions couldn’t get enough of Rush. Doing three hours of radio a day to a national audience since 1988, he spawned not just imitators but an entire industry in political talk radio and conservative media that remains thriving to this day.
Limbaugh proved an untapped market existed for unabashedly conservative commentary, for people who didn’t care about whether or not it was deemed responsible or whether someone would judge them for listening. It wasn’t that people loved Rush because he was the first conservative commentator; they loved him because he was the first one who didn’t care who hated him.
Limbaugh leaves behind a legacy that is twofold, not just as a bombastic talk show host but as one of the country’s most generous philanthropists. His charitable acts ranged from raising tens of millions of dollars for cancer research to paying the mortgage for a fallen police officer’s family. Rush was renowned for his personal humility and his propensity for small acts of kindness. Big-ticket donations aside, he lived in the spirit of generosity.
Rush’s cancer diagnosis was a shock to longtime listeners, but it quickly became clear that soon the day would come when Rush signed off for the last time. To listen to Rush’s last months on-air was not to hear someone defeated or broken, but to witness someone who had come to terms with their own mortality and chose to face it with vigor and courage.
Rush Limbaugh was a pioneer, a master of his craft, and a philanthropist whose compassion was felt by so many. He spent his last days the way he had lived the rest of them, fighting for what he believed in and sharing his vision of the truth with his millions of beloved listeners.
