Rush Limbaugh: New Media Prevented Mainstream Media from Turning 'Gentle Giant' into Rodney King

Rush Limbaugh: New Media Prevented Mainstream Media from Turning 'Gentle Giant' into Rodney King

Rush Limbaugh said the mainstream media, as desperately as they tried, could not turn "gentle giant" Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson after Brown allegedly charged and beat him, into Rodney King because of today's new media.
Even though Rodney King resisted the arrest of officers who tried all they could to detain him without using force, the nation never got to see the full video. Instead, the mainstream media used an edited one-minute clip of officers brutally beating King after he charged them to fan the flames, trying to hammer home the notion that white police officers stopped a black motorist and senselessly beat him like a dog in cold blood.
Similarly, after Michael Brown's death, the mainstream media tried to paint a picture of Brown as a victim whom a white and racist officer "executed" in cold blood, while Brown was on his knees with his hands up and back turned. But they could not get away with it this time, 22 years after the Rodney King incident that ultimately led to extreme civil unrest and the Los Angeles riots.
Limbaugh said that the difference today "is that there is an entire, very large media and otherwise apparatus that is aligned and empowered and in action, specifically aimed at denying the myth makers a free road, a free rein to write whatever story they want."
"It's the story of the alternative media. It's the story of talk radio destroying the monopoly of the Drive-By Media," Limbaugh declared on his Friday radio show, emphasizing that the mainstream media "no longer get to dictate what is the news" and "no longer get to dictate what doesn't get reported or told."
"They no longer get to dictate commentary about it. They are challenged on virtually every assertion they make, be it the writing of a myth, be it the ignoring of a certain piece of evidence in the story, be it lying about certain things," Limbaugh added.
The conservative icon said that, with the rise of new media, "there are watchdogs everywhere making sure" that the mainstream press "don't have a free road anymore, a free, open road to write any incident the way they want it written."
"Well, now, there are people willing to stand up, go to great lengths to call 'em out on this, so they simply don't have a free road." Limbaugh continued. "And they're not used to this kind of opposition, even though it's not new now. They've never learned how to fight."
Limbaugh noticed that "CNN is noticeably down" because, even in their headlines, "it's beginning to dawn on them that the myth might not prevail here." Headlines have included, "It's starting to return to normal in Ferguson" and "the credibility of key witnesses in question." He noted that even the New York Times conceded, even though it was in paragraph 26, that the police officer was "beaten up" and "still taken to the hospital."
Limbaugh said the original story of "the gentle giant walking innocently down the street on the way to grandmother's house, eagerly thinking about the soon-to-commence college classes, shot in the back by a racist white St. Louis cop" is falling apart.
After the mainstream press tried to rebuild the myth of the "gentle giant," surveillance video of his strong-arm robbery was released, "and the gentle giant was no longer gentle," Limbaugh noted.
"He was a thief. Forty-four dollar box of Swisher Sweets, and furthermore, he was abusive to the clerk, shoving him away, as the clerk attempted to keep him from walking out of the store with the stolen cigars," Limbaugh said. "Then we learn from an autopsy conducted by the myth makers that the gentle giant was not shot from behind. And then we learned that the gentle giant actually did reach into the car and may have attempted to get the cop's gun. And so then a number of witnesses came forward, but many of them are beginning to lose credibility."
In light of these facts, Limbaugh said, "the myth is getting a little harder to hold onto, because if there was ever any real media scrutiny involved, the myth could not survive."
"You can see that watching CNN, there's not this confidence that the myth, as originally created, is gonna hold up, simply because it can't," he said. "You can tell by watching CNN that something's happened, and it's no longer the slam dunk that everybody thought it was, even two days ago."
Six years after the Los Angeles riots, Matt Drudge changed the media landscape forever by breaking the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, which the legacy press tried to conceal. New and alternative media have continued to gain more influence since, and Limbaugh observed that liberals who have been coddled by the mainstream press have "never been in the ring" and have "never had to deal with never-ending, constant media, oppressive attention, attempting to find any flaw to write them out of any story, to discredit them, to destroy them."
"Leftists really don't know what to do when the media turns on 'em, even for the smallest things, even for the briefest of moments. Because leftists have been treated so slavishly and with such sycophancy by members of the Drive-By Media that they just aren't prepared to do battle," he said. "They're not prepared to deal with people calling them on lies. They're not prepared. They haven't been toughened up."
Since "this is something the left has no experience with," Limbaugh said, "they panic when there is the slightest bump in the road." Limbaugh emphasized that young, liberal upstarts enhance their resumes by taking out "Republicans and other wealthy people," but they "very rarely" try to "to destroy Democrat people of power."
He said that after new media outlets exposed the many lies, edits, and omissions of the mainstream press after Trayvon Martin's death, the mainstream press took it on the chin. But he said the legacy media "keep trying" to "manufacture it in such a way that it looks no different than what happened in the 1960s because in that way, nothing's changed. We have made no progress. We're still a racist nation. We still have white cops who will shoot a black kid on sight for no reason whatsoever. Nothing's improved in America on that score."
Limbaugh concluded that new media outlets must always be on alert, though, and never underestimate the "myth makers" in the mainstream press who want the country to believe "that white cops shoot innocent black kids all the time," even though that is not remotely true.
"The myth makers have not given up by any stretch," he warned.