WHY RUSH LIMBAUGH IS AN UNRELIABLE SOURCE The basketball program at the University of Connecticut has been going through rough times: the NCAA has punished the school for its players’ poor academic performance; and three players were arrested in separate incidents, two of which involved violence against women. In the wake of all that bad publicity, the UConn administration launched a big “re-branding” public-relations campaign, centered on revising the school’s husky mascot logo to look more fierce. The university president enthusiastically described the new logo as sending the message: “Do not mess with me.” One female student thought the administration should have made cleaning up the basketball program a priority instead, so last April, after the president gushed in a major speech about how “aggressive” the new logo was, the student published an open letter to her president. The Daily Caller, a conservative website, gave the letter a negative write-up, which in turn inspired Rush Limbaugh to denounce the student as part of an effort by “the left and their unwitting dupes” to do away with football everywhere. Here’s the gist of how Limbaugh portrayed the student’s letter on his radio show: he said she professed to be “scared” of the new husky logo; and that she objected to it because it “promotes rape,” will intimidate women, and will “empower rape culture.” He predicted UConn would respond to the student’s letter by convening a faculty panel, hiring a political consultant, conducting a poll, investigating the logo artist for rape, and changing the logo. “They’ll change it. You know damn well they will,” Limbaugh said, telling his listeners they should believe him because “I know this stuff.” That sounded dramatic when I heard his broadcast back in April, so I looked up the student’s letter. When I did, I saw that all of his characterizations of what the student said were false. The student never said she was afraid of the new logo. What she did was contrast the administration’s focus on the “fictitious” logo with its lack of action on the “real” problems of the athletic program. She explicitly said that the logo WASN’T scary — and that what was actually frightening was the possibility that real-life Huskies believed administrators wouldn’t “mess” with them no matter what they did to the women on campus. I heard Limbaugh again today in the car, which prompted me to check up on his predictions about the university’s response. Everything he said about that was wrong, too. The new logo is in place to stay. So what are the possible explanations for the fact that everything Limbaugh said about this issue was false? Maybe he’s lazy, and couldn’t be bothered to check out a story that the Daily Caller had already tailored to his proclivities. Maybe he knew the truth, and decided it didn’t serve his purposes. Either way, any "dittoheads" who swear by what they hear on his show are making a mistake. thefeministwire/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-uconn-president-susan-herbst/
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 02:12:43 +0000
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