Milestones: 11 Years Ago In Time

Before Michael Moore, the new faces of poli-tainment were radio shock jocks RUSH LIMBAUGH and HOWARD STERN, who were paired on TIME’s cover in 1993. The question from a decade ago echoes the one being raised today in connection with Moore’s movie: Is America’s political discourse getting coarser?

America can pretty much be divided in two: on one side are Rush’s people and Howard’s people, and on the other the decorous and civilized who tend to be uncomfortable with strong broadcast opinion unless it comes from Bill Moyers, Bill Buckley or, if pressed, Andy Rooney. The Rush and Howard people … seem to be winning, or certainly proliferating … Limbaugh and Stern are popular because their audiences consider them uniquely honest, commonsensical, funny and a bit reck-less (more than a bit in Stern’s case) at a time when most people on radio and TV seem phony, impersonal, dull, dissembling, hedging. Both are irreverent, acute, bombastic, iconoclastic, outlandishly populist rabble-rousers who make millions of dollars a year. They are national ids, gleeful and unfettered. Howard is Rush’s evil twin, Goofus to his Gallant.

–TIME, Nov. 1, 1993