Here’s a Big Thing Their Detractors Don’t Get about Coulter and Limbaugh
Even those who aren’t enamored of them read Coulter and listen to Limbaugh or visit his web site (which happens to be new, improved, and when last checked, provided a week’s worth of content before it disappears behind his subscription wall [was previously only one day]) because they report obvious news that “somehow” either didn’t get reported at all, or barely got mentioned.
A week ago Wednesday, Coulter told us how New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum did not have to die in January 2006. But after regaling us with another story we never heard about, she notes that he did die, largely if not completely because of shoddy ambulance service and hospital treatment.
In a typical story from the nation’s capital, last year, a 38-year-old woman died at the hospital after her blood pressure dropped and a D.C. ambulance took 90 minutes to pick her up and take her to a hospital that was five minutes away. For 90 minutes, the 911 operator repeatedly assured the woman’s sister that the ambulance was on its way.
You read these stories every few months in Washington.
New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum also died in Washington last year after being treated to the famed work ethic of the average government employee. Rosenbaum was mugged near his house and hit on the head with a pipe. A neighbor found him lying on the sidewalk and immediately called 911.
First, the ambulance got lost on the way to Rosenbaum. Then, instead of taking him to the closest emergency room, the ambulance took him to Howard University Hospital, nearly 30 minutes away, because one of the “emergency medical technicians” had personal business in the area.
Once he finally arrived at the hospital, Rosenbaum was left unattended on a gurney for 90 minutes because the “emergency medical technicians” had completely missed his head injury and listed him as “drunk” and “low priority.”
Months later, the deputy mayor for public safety told The Washington Post that “to the best of his knowledge, no one involved in the incident had been fired.”
Given that the reporter was a pretty prominent guy, it’s more than a little surprising that such maltreatment with such outrageously weak results went virtually unreported outside of DC — and it appears that DC reportage was mostly, if not only, due to one reporter who was outraged. To its credit, the NY Times did carry one story in June (may require free registration).
It should also be noted that a family lawsuit that was settled earlier this month over Rosenbaum’s death has some pretty amazing terms:
In the settlement, the city will not pay any money to the family. Instead, the family has agreed to withdraw the lawsuit and give the District of Columbia one year to improve emergency medical services. If it does not improve, the family can refile the lawsuit.
The point is that this leads to a question that readers of Coulter and listeners to Limbaugh who also closely follow current events end up asking themselves time and again: Why did I not hear about this earlier?
As long as these kinds of Formerly Mainstream Media “misses” keep taking place, Coulter and Limbaugh will at least retain, and likely grow, their already huge followings.
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UPDATE: Another obvious example — Limbaugh (link will apparently be free until Monday evening) and other talks hosts mentioned the Gathering of Eagles (GoE) “turnout rout” earlier this week. As noted earlier, the two “newspapers of record” totally misrepresented the relative turnouts and did what they could to portray GoErs unfavorably.
