The news sent shockwaves through a conservative media that Limbaugh has shaped for three decades with millions of weekly listeners and influence with the top ranks of the Republican Party.
“There are going to be days that I’m not going to be able to be here because I’m undergoing treatment or I’m reacting to treatment,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “My intention is to come here every day I can, and to do this program as normally and as competently and as expertly as I do each and every day, because that is the source of my greatest satisfaction professionally, personally.”
Limbaugh told listeners of his show Monday that he was diagnosed in late January, soon after his 69th birthday, and will begin treatment shortly.
“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this,” he said. “And I thought about not telling anybody. I thought about trying to do this without anybody knowing, because I don’t like making things about me.”
Much of conservative media today can trace its roots back to Limbaugh’s entrance to the national stage near the end of the Reagan era. And he still carries huge sway in its collective output today.
“This is seismic. He made this whole industry,” said Brian Rosenwald, author of Talk Radio’s America and a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. “He showed there was a hunger out there, a market, for an entertaining conservative news product that talked about the issues of the day. Without Rush, I don’t know that we get Fox, I don’t know that we get the entire conservative media empire.”
Launched in 1988, The Rush Limbaugh Show injected a smashmouth politics into talk radio that hadn’t previously existed. The syndicated radio program was accompanied by a TV show in the early 1990s that was produced by Roger Ailes. Ailes would go on to mastermind Fox News starting with its launch in 1996.
“Fox’s programming is very much a television version of what Rush did first,” Rosenwald said. “Anyone who’s in the conservative media world can tell you that Rush drives the content on a lot of these other shows.”
