Claim: Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh once told a black caller to "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."
Example:[Collected on the Internet, 2003]
[Limbaugh's] current job, as self-appointed spokesman for the "angry white males", evolved over the years — his attitudes never did. As a young broadcaster in the 1970s he once told a black caller: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back." A decade later he was musing: "Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"1
Origins: With the current brouhaha over talk radio host Rush Limbaugh's comments concerning Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, and his subsequent resignation from ESPN's
"Sunday NFL Countdown" due to the controversy, the game of digging up examples of Limbaugh's making racially insensitive or offensive remarks is afoot again.
Certainly the most notorious racial remark attributed to Limbaugh is his telling a black caller on his radio talk show to "Take that bone out of your nose and call me again," a claim which dates to at least 1990, with the incident supposedly having occurred as far back as the 1970s. It was brought up again recently by several media outlets, including BET (Black Entertainment Television), and it has been mentioned by FAIR(Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) several times over the years. Nearly all the information available on this subject is anecdotal, with no documentation and no specifics mentioned other than that the alleged quote was something Limbaugh "once said" or uttered "as a young broadcaster in the 1970s."
In 1995, Steven Rendall (FAIR's senior analyst), Jeff Cohen (FAIR's executive director), and Jim Naureckas (the editor of FAIR's magazine and newsletter) published The Way Things Aren't, a compilation of "Over 100 outrageously false and foolish statements from America's most powerful radio and TV commentator." The general format of the book was to quote a Limbaugh statement verbatim, along with information about when and in what medium he said it, and then provide an explanation of why the statement was factually incorrect. The "take that bone out of your nose" quote was included in this book, but not as a documented utterance — The Way Things Aren't merely reproduced the quote and cited it as something reported in a New York Newsday article back in 1990 without quoting any portion of the article
itself.
However, a helpful reader provided us with a copy of that Newsday article (from the 8 October 1990 edition), and that article does report Rush Limbaugh as admitting he felt guilty for once having told a difficult-to-understand black caller to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back." (This incident occurred not on Rush Limbaugh's now-familiar talk and political commentary radio program, but at the beginning of his broadcast career back in the early 1970s when he was hosting a Top 40 music show under the name "Jeff Christie" on either WIXZ or KQV in Pittsburgh.) The same article also quotes Limbaugh as confirming that he did utter another line commonly mentioned in tandem with the "bone" quote: "Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"
Since Rush Limbaugh presumably wouldn't have expressed feelings of guilt over an apocryphal story, and as far as we know he hasn't ever denied or disclaimed what Newsday reported he told them, we have to put this one in the "true" column.
Last updated: 4 September 2007
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/limbaugh.asp
"Sunday NFL Countdown" due to the controversy, the game of digging up examples of Limbaugh's making racially insensitive or offensive remarks is afoot again.
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