Is Alt-Right Media on its Way Out?

The first time I heard Rush Limbaugh I was driving back from a business meeting in Cleveland in 1993. I was driving on I-80 and was just flipping through AM stations when all of a sudden this voice was talking about Bill Clinton in a way I had never heard anyone ever talk about any President before or since.

The voice that came over the radio was loud, it was sarcastic, it was profane, and most of all you could feel the anger morphing into hate.

Rush created the alt-right media echo chamber all by himself. In 1994 when he hooked up with Newt Gingrich and became a daily PR machine for the ‘contract with America’ campaign which gave the GOP control of the House for the first time since 1952.

From 1994 until he went off the air in 2021, Rush used his daily show to promote the GOP, often fashioning his narratives directly from a ‘talking points’ memo that the RNC faxed out to the growing list of AM shock-jocks every day.

The growth of a media environment which promoted conservative politics then took a major step forward with the launch of Fox News on TV in 1996 followed by the leadership provided by Roger Aisles beginning in 2001. Ailes took his cue from Limbaugh, redefining the word ‘news’ to encompass both facts and opinion with no differentiation between the two, along with a harsh and unrelenting assault on liberal-slanted media competitors like MS-NBC and CNN.

This shift away from ‘hard’ news to ‘soft’ news was made possible by the easing of…