When Bill Clinton finally abandoned the White House, some prognosticators declared that Rush Limbaugh surely would begin to fade after eight gleeful years of Bubba-bashing.
But the latest ratings show that Limbaugh is more popular than a year ago, up in 13 of 16 major markets even as he switches from slashing offense to issue-oriented defense of President Bush. And that is giving the conservative talkmeister the last laugh over those who dismissed him as mainly the champion of Clinton-hating dittoheads.
"I was never obsessed with Clinton personally," Limbaugh says. "He was so dominant that he could not be avoided. But I am happy he is gone. I actively avoid mentioning him now.
"It is like being freed from prison," he adds. "There is so much more to talk about now, and not just politics. . . . The Left is always more fun when they are out of power trying to reacquire it. They are wacky trying to get noticed. They are 'dangerous' when they are in power implementing what they believe, but funny as hell when not. Witness all this Earth Day hysteria and Barbra Streisand."
On one recent show, Limbaugh said: "The environmentalist wackos are going wacko." Of Take Your Daughter to Work Day, he said "the radical feminazis" were asking for special treatment for girls. He also talks football, Napster and SUVs.
To be sure, Limbaugh, who dined at the White House in March, often sounds like the fiercest of GOP loyalists, and therefore less entertaining. While he has chided Bush for backpedaling on environmental issues, for the most part he effusively praises the new president.
Bush "is poised here to join the roster of great presidents," Limbaugh tells listeners. He admits in an interview that "I am a cheerleader for conservative Republicans," but insists that "I am the first to give this administration grief when I think they deserve it."
Limbaugh points out that his show grew from 56 to 500 stations during the first Bush administration, while adding an additional 150 during the Clinton years.
In Arbitron's January to March ratings, Limbaugh is up in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore and Washington (where the number of listeners on WMAL has risen from 48,000 to 51,000 since the news-hungry Florida recount period). He is down in St. Louis, but still commands 12.3 percent of the audience there in his first hour. His combined weekly audience of nearly 20 million dwarfs that of the most popular cable talk shows.
"There is no one even close to me, save Dr. Laura, and she does not do issues," Limbaugh says.
Bottom line: The former rock deejay stays atop the talk radio heap after 14 years on the national airwaves because he knows how to have fun skewering his opponents.
"The idea that Clinton made me is a popular myth dispelled by my own history," Limbaugh says. "And remember, I took a bit of a hit during O.J., also during Clinton's years, that took me some time to rebuild, but I did. The point is that Clinton was not the magic that my critics claim."
Still Making Waves
When Daniel Schorr was interviewing Walter Ulbricht in 1962, the East German leader got so mad that he started yelling and stalked off the set.
At a subsequent Paris lunch with CBS boss Bill Paley, Schorr was told: "I really loved the serene, composed way you nodded your head back at him."
Schorr explained it was a reaction shot filmed after Ulbricht's stormy departure.
"But is that honest?" Paley asked.
"Of course it's not honest. But it's what they told me to do at your network."
At 84, Schorr has lost none of his feistiness, as his new memoir, "Staying Tuned," makes clear. "Television now plays a part in our lives in which we are no longer exactly sure what is real," Schorr says in an interview. "I think that's a terrible loss. You have to be really old to worry about this, but I worry."
The book contains some fascinating episodes:
• In 1955, while weighing Edward R. Murrow's offer to join CBS, Schorr asked Turner Catledge, the New York Times managing editor, about a job he had been promised months earlier. Catledge told him to sign with CBS. Schorr says he learned years later that the offer fell through because Catledge had ordered a freeze on the hiring of Jewish correspondents.
• During the 1976 controversy over Schorr obtaining a secret House intelligence report, CBS not only suspended him but also pressured him into a deception in which he resigned but agreed not to say so publicly.
Schorr was widely denounced for leaking the report to the Village Voice after CBS refused to print it through one of its publishing companies. When Schorr likened the report to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he says CBS News chief Dick Salant told him: "Dan, you're dreaming. The New York Times is not regulated. We operate in a regulated environment." Salant asked Schorr to stay when public sympathy turned his way, but Schorr quit anyway.
• At a lunch with Jesse Jackson and Ted Turner (Schorr had been CNN's first editorial employee), the CNN founder said that one answer to minority unemployment might be for blacks to carry missiles from silo to silo, "the way Egyptians used to carry stone blocks during the building of the pyramids."
"Your husband is a rich racist brat," Jackson told Jane Fonda. But Schorr says that "Turner's bigotry seemed mainly for shock effect," noting that Turner later joined the NAACP.
"I don't want to sound like an old coot," the National Public Radio commentator says now, "but the younger generation today is much more interested in getting on the air than anything else. I don't find today among younger journalists a great sense of courageous defense of the First Amendment. They make nice with their bosses. They are less idealistic."
Less Brill
Brill's Content is cutting back from 10 issues a year to quarterly in an effort to break even faster. The company, which recently bought Inside.com, has also dropped plans to relaunch as Inside Content and will lay off another eight to 12 staffers.
Hot Air?
From Inauguration Day to Earth Day, 97 percent of all comments about global warming on four major network newscasts reflected the liberal side of the debate.
So says the conservative Media Research Group, which examined the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news and CNN's "Inside Politics." Only one statement by reporters or news sources -- when a CNN correspondent referred to Bush's view on the "incomplete state of scientific knowledge" -- expressed skepticism about global warming.
Typical was a CBS report on Bush rejecting the Kyoto global-warming treaty: "Global temperatures on the rise, glaciers retreating, storms more frequent and severe -- a looming crisis, say many scientists, of the greenhouse effect."
The exception, says the study, was Brit Hume's "Special Report" on Fox News Channel, on which 37 percent of the comments were skeptical about global warming.
Footnote: "Fox News Sunday" is popular with Bush, who taped a fifth-anniversary tribute to host Tony Snow. The president praised him as a great speechwriter for his dad who has made "an impressive transition to journalism."
Howard Kurtz appears on CNN's weekly media program.
