Rush Limbaugh

Others have since joined FAIR in questioning Limbaugh's facts. Al Franken, a former comedian and current Democratic Senator of Minnesota, wrote a satirical book (Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations) in which he accused Limbaugh of distorting facts to serve his own political biases.

Limbaugh has been criticized for inaccuracies by the Environmental Defense Fund. A defense fund report authored by Princeton University endowed geoscience professor Michael Oppenheimer and professor of biology David Wilcove lists 14 significant scientific facts that, the authors allege, Limbaugh misrepresented in his book The Way Things Ought to Be. The authors conclude that "Rush Limbaugh... allows his political bias to distort the truth about a whole range of important scientific issues."

On October 14, 2011, Limbaugh questioned the U.S. military initiative against one of the most wanted men in the world Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), based on the assumption that they were Christians. "They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them." Upon learning about the accusations leveled against Kony, which included kidnapping whole schools of young children for use as child soldiers, Limbaugh stated that he would research the group. The show's written transcript on his website was not changed. Read Less

Limbaugh stated his addiction to painkillers resulted from several years of severe back pain heightened by a botched surgery intended to correct those problems.

A subsequent investigation into whether Limbaugh had violated Florida's doctor shopping laws was launched by the Palm Beach State Attorney, which raised privacy issues when investigators seized Limbaugh's private medical records looking for evidence of crimes. On November 9, 2005, following two years of investigations, Assistant State Attorney James L. Martz requested the court to set aside Limbaugh's doctor–patient confidentiality rights and allow the state to question his physicians. Limbaugh's attorney opposed the prosecutor's efforts to interview his doctors on the basis of patient privacy rights, and argued that the prosecutor had violated Limbaugh's Fourth Amendment rights by illegally seizing his medical records. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement in agreement and filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Limbaugh. On December 12, 2005, Judge David F. Crow delivered a ruling prohibiting the State of Florida from questioning Limbaugh's physicians about "the medical condition of the patient and any information disclosed to the health care practitioner by the patient in the course of the care and treatment of the patient." Read Less

Limbaugh has been noted for making controversial race-related statements with regard to African-Americans. He has drawn connections between African-American appearance and criminality on several occasions, once opining that all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resembled Jesse Jackson, and another time that "the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons." While employed as what he describes as an "insult-radio" DJ, he used a derogatory racial stereotype to characterize a black caller he could not understand, telling the caller to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back." Read Less