CALLER: Yeah. My pleasure. You know, I don't want to sound insensitive, and Robin Williams was absolutely a wonderful talent. But, you know, it used to be that the media would sort of downplay celebrity suicide, which I think was actually a good and right thing. I just feel like they're making a huge deal about this when there's so much other news like Iraq, Israel, Missouri, et cetera, that they should be focusing on. My question is, what do you think the political reason for their doing this is?
RUSH: Well, interesting question. You know, I'm the guy that says there's politics in everything and you've gotta be able to spot it, and you're right, there is here. This really is an example of the dedication the media has to pop culture events and how important it is in the eyes of their audience. Whereas in Washington, the media thinks the world is on fire because of what's happening in the Middle East, your average TMZ viewer thinks the world doesn't make any sense anymore because Robin Williams committed suicide. The thing I worry about, I really do, they're making such heroism out of this that I hope it doesn't inspire a lot of copycats by people seeking the same kind of fame. And that's been one of my big concerns with social media from the get-go. I saw all these people just giving up every bit of information about themselves, just this desire to have everybody know everything about them, and we know that one of the allures of pop culture media is this desire to be famous and have pop culture media talk about you. And this is one way to do it, obviously. To kill yourself is one way to get the media to spend a lot of time talking about you, if you want to be talked about. I hope it doesn't spawn a bunch of copycats. Source
