The Blog Post That Drove Rush Limbaugh to Tweet
Rush Limbaugh has had a personal Twitter account since 2009, but it has taken him over three years to send his first tweet. He wanted to share a blog post concerning the boycott of advertisers on his show.
Here's how the opposition astroturfs advertisers. Smart piece from @LegInsurrection Pls. Retweet bit.ly/y6Tnnv @mmfa
— Rush Limbaugh (@limbaugh) March 15, 2012
The link goes to a post on Legal Insurrection, a blog run by Cornell law professor William Jacobson linking the advertisers who have dropped Limbaugh's show to the liberal advocates against right-wing media Media Matters. Jacobson argues:
The secondary boycott of Rush Limbaugh advertisers is portrayed in the media as a reaction to a groundswell of public outrage. In fact, the secondary boycott was initiated by and driven by Media Matters, which had a “Stop Limbaugh” campaign on the shelf waiting to be used, and was executed by Angelo Carusone, Director of Online Strategy for Media Matters.
The @Limbaugh Twitter account isn't verified yet, but we and others feel safe assuming it's real after he announced his intention to tweet on his show on Thursday. Via Politico, he said:
“I’ve had a Twitter account just to lock it up, a genuine Rush Limbaugh Twitter account, not a fake phony one, just to keep it under my domain control... I’m not going to be hanging on Twitter 15 hours a day and tweeting, ‘Just had breakfast, have a wonderful day! Bye! Here’s a picture of me eating some cornflakes!’ None of that stuff. Just things I want people to see and there’s a really good one today that I want people to see, and I’m going to tweet it out.”
While it's not surprising that Limbaugh would want to drive readers to Jacobson's post, it is odd that he was so excited to drive them there that he embraced an entirely new platform of communication to do so! It makes it look like he knows he's under fire, and he's looking for new ways to combat his opponents by entering the fast-paced and often uncivil twitter-sphere.
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