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At last report, Rush Limbaugh made about $20 million a year for saying obnoxious things in public, so it shouldn't have come as any surprise that he'd say something obnoxious during his stint as a pre-game commentator on ESPN.
Nor should it have come as any real surprise that he's now under investigation in Florida for illegally procuring immense quantities of prescription drugs through his former housemaid.
Limbaugh, like many other alleged conservatives, has been a consummate hypocrite on this topic. He talks about the virtues of a smaller, less intrusive government, and yet he supports the War on Drugs, which necessarily involves a bigger and more intrusive government.
I am appalled at people,
he once said, who
look at all this abhorrent behavior and say 'People are
going to do drugs anyway -- let's legalize it.' Those who
are for it are 100 percent selfish.
It is odd to hear a right-thinker condemn selfishness,
but as the old saying goes, Nobody sings louder than the
whore in church.
Just ask William Bennett, author of
The Book of Virtues
and a high-roller at the
casinos. And I've lost count of how many Home, Church &
Family politicians and televangelists have been caught with
prostitutes, underaged boys, underaged girls, kiddie porn
and the like.
You come to expect that, so it's not surprising. What is disturbing is that I, like millions of other Americans, was forced to pay some of Limbaugh's salary during his ESPN tenure.
When he blusters and entertains his army of dittoheads on one of the local radio stations, I can just turn it off or change stations.
But ESPN is a different matter. Even if I never watch it, I still have to pay for it. And if you've got cable or a satellite dish, you're probably paying for it, too, whether you watch it or not.
ESPN, like the ABC network, is part of that big Mickey Mouse outfit, the Walt Disney Company. ESPN has two income streams. It sells ads, and it charges cable and satellite distribution systems to carry its programming.
That's the American way, but ESPN and its parent Disney company do more than that. For one thing, Disney will require the cable operator to carry all of its channels (all six ESPN varieties, ABC, ABC Family, the Disney Channel, etc.) if it carries any. That means fewer slots for other media, like feisty non-corporate channels.
Further, the typical ESPN-Disney contract with a cable company requires access to at least 90 percent of the subscribers.
So the cable company can't really make ESPN a premium channel like HBO or Starz that isn't part of the basic package, and requires extra fees. ESPN pretty much has to be part of the regular programming package, if the cable company is going to carry it at all.
ESPN is one of the most expensive cable buys, with rates around $2.50 per month per subscriber. And it raises its rate by about 20 percent each year. That helps explain why cable rates have been going up faster than inflation.
Andy Muhl of the American Cable Association, a trade
group, said sports were the major cause for rate increases.
ESPN made a bad business decision, he said, in recently
paying $2.4 billion to broadcast NBA games. They are
negotiating almost obscene contracts. The networks can't
raise enough advertising revenue to pay for it, so who gets
stuck with it? The cable operators and ultimately the
consumer.
Jerry Kent, former CEO of cable operator Charter
Communications, observed that ESPN is a virtual
monopoly. Backed up by Disney, it has a gun to the head of
cable operators.
In other words, if a cable operator wants customers to
be able to watch ABC's Nightline,
he's got to buy
the whole Disney-ABC-ESPN package, and figure out how to
pay the annual 20 percent a year increase when he has
trouble going up by more than 5 percent a year.
A few years ago the local cable monopoly dropped CSPAN, KRMA and the Weather Channel to give us Fox News because Rupert Murdoch paid $10 a head for every customer the cable operator could betray. So we got satellite service. But even there, ESPN is part of the minimum package. We have to pay for it, even though I didn't know we had ESPN until a visiting brother-in-law inquired.
There is legislation proposed in Congress to eliminate this ESPN tax by allowing cable operators to make it a subscription service like HBO. If that passed, those who want to finance Rush Limbaugh and millionaire athletes in subsidized stadiums could pay for what they want, and the rest of us could spend our money elsewhere. But that seems fair, so it probably won't happen.
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