I have a confession to make. This year I became a regular Rush Limbaugh listener. Why? Know thy enemy. As a regular listener to Limbaugh's sleazy show this latest revelation about the origin of the content of his show comes as no surprise to me.
A new report by Politico says Rush is paid $2 million a year to parrot the Heritage Foundation's talking points about how what's good for oligarchs is good for America, to lavish praise on the Heritage Foundation for the wonderful job they're doing, and to urge his listeners to send their money to the Heritage Foundation. Sean Hannity also is paid $1.3 million a year to shill for Heritage on his show.
When the GOP doubled down on crazy
According to a well-documented report in Politico, such fearless, independent thinkers as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are taking millions in payola to promote the policy ideas of the Heritage Foundation without necessarily letting listeners in on the secret.
But what they are doing is weaving praise for Heritage Foundation pronouncements seamlessly into their programs without letting on that they're being paid a small fortune to do so: $2 million a year in Limbaugh's case; $1.3 million in Hannity's.
The Heritage Foundation, in turn, is one of those Scrooge McDuck-style "think tanks" largely funded by right-wing billionaires like the late Joseph Coors and the Koch brothers. Its "resident scholars" churn out one half-baked study after another proving that economic prosperity depends upon plutocrats paying little or no taxes.
See, like Uncle Scrooge, some of these jokers are pathologically addicted to hoarding. It's not enough that the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. They'd really like it all.
The report also said that Glenn Beck is being paid by FreedomWorks to tout them and their line. Right Wing radio talker Mark Levin gets money from Americans for Prosperity.
From the Politico report:
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck sell endorsements to conservative groups
In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotional tie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising.
“The point that people don’t realize,” said Michael Harrison, founder and publisher of the talk media trade publication TALKERS Magazine,
Some sponsorship deals also include so-called “embedded ads” in which the sponsors’ initiatives are weaved into the content of the show, say sources familiar with the arrangements, while the hosts have been known to feature officials from their sponsoring groups on their shows, though the sources say that’s not typically part of the arrangements.
Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.
The gullible audiences for these shows are completely clueless where these messages are really originating from, or that the hosts are advancing the narrow interests of the oligarchs who fund these Right Wing foundations with secret money.
This shows how the Republican Party's ideology is being set by the biggest donors to their phoney foundations.
