Rush Limbaugh identified National Review as a news media outfit that prioritizes the pursuit of “approval [from] the mainstream media” over veracity in reporting, offering his remarks on Monday’s edition of his eponymous show.

Limbaugh highlighted recent news media narratives framing a group of Covington Catholic High School students as “racists,” including agreement from ostensibly conservative news media outlets and personalities.

LISTEN:

Limbaugh said:

One of the biggest problems that we as conservatives have was on full display all weekend long, continuing into this morning — and that is, quite simply, we have a lot of people who would rather lose gracefully with the approval of the mainstream media than simply use their heads and understand who our opposition is. … When we see a picture of a teenager who’s white wearing a Trump hat, a “Make America Great Again” hat, and he’s standing there smiling while some aging Indian leftist activist is beating a war drum, what do we do? We immediately condemn the kid, without even thinking! Without even learning anything, without even taking a few minutes to understand what happened! Instead of using our instincts! “Okay, we got a left-wing Indian activist there. We’ve got the media jumping all over it.” The red flags should have gone up immediately, and everybody on our side should have called ’em out for what this was! But instead, we had people on the right condemning the kids. … These people are scared to death of the media and the first and only thing they care about is media approval. They don’t want to be lumped in with the kids! So you have a bunch of kids from a Catholic high school standing around minding their own business, being assaulted by a militant, leftist black group and then having an Indian group with an aging leftist Indian activist named Nathan Phillips come start batting on his war drum. And the assumption is the kids, because they’re wearing Trump hats and because they’re white, must have provoked the whole thing. And so you dump on ’em so that your friends in the media in Washington will realize you’re not one of these Trump-loving stupid little kid supporters.

Limbaugh then name-checked National Review:

Our old buddies at National Review were among the first to pile on these kids. What would make a bunch of people on our side want to destroy teenagers? I’ll tell you what would make them want to destroy teenagers: Salvaging their own reputations. They couldn’t afford, in their own thinking, to be seen as being on the same side as these evil kids. … And right there: National Review, they start condemning these kids. … National Review has erased, they’ve deleted their original story on this, whoever wrote it.

Breitbart News’s John Nolte similarly assessed National Review‘s motivations in pushing left-wing and partisan Democrat hoaxes as grounded in pursuit of affection from news media outlets such as MSNBC.

Nolte wrote, “National Review really should change its motto from ‘Can We Please, Please, Please Be On Morning Joe’ to ‘Fake News Never Sleeps.'”

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.