It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses Tenure

By last evening I was completely blown out on the trail, and while composing a take home essay prompt for my students’ upcoming midterm, I alternated between writing gibberish and dozing off. The task took me at least twice as long as it should have done, but I finally completed the job, and feel reasonably confident that it’s coherent. If not I should get some very interesting student essays.

Once again I have to postpone explaining how El Rushbo used to be fun, because something interesting has cropped up. Yesterday I chanced to have a conversation with the staff member who handles the OSU History Department’s web site and social media accounts, and happened to tell her about this new page. She said she’d like to share them to the Department’s own Facebook Page—unless they were political.

Naturally I said that they were. But she soon clarified that she meant *partisan* political, whereas I see myself as writing political history. Of course, it’s contemporary political history, to say the least. Or maybe not. The starting point for my maiden post on conservative media was about 1975–or let’s call it 1977 in honor of my high school graduating class. That’s 42 years ago. Rush Limbaugh’s radIo career began even earlier, and he first came to prominence in 1990–29 years ago.

On top of that, as I’ll eventually convey, the roots of conservative media actually go back to the 1930s.

Nonetheless, whenever a partisan post inadvertently appears on the OSU History Page, someone calls to complain and the post has to be deleted. So in order to quell the skepticism of some reader who just ain’t buying it, let me talk a bit about the challenges of writing the political history of comparatively recent events.

But since I have a policy of keeping the word count of these posts to about 600 words (on the theory that too many readers would bypass something longer), I’ll defer that discussion to my next post.