Rush Limbaugh Demoted To Another Irrelevant, Ratings-Challenged Station In A Major Market

[Machiavelli]

Eric Boehlert
Media Matters for America
June 17, 2015

The good news for Rush Limbaugh: One month after being notified he was getting dumped by his Boston talk radio host station, the talker has a new AM home in the city.   

The bad news: The station currently boasts a 0.6 rating, trails four non-commercial stations in the market, and becomes yet another big-city, cellar-dwelling outpost that Limbaugh is forced to call home.

The station, WKOX, is the type of "bottom-rung" affiliate that Limbaugh was rarely associated with during his halcyon days as the king of talk radio. But those days seem to be dwindling as the Boston fall from grace has previously played out for Limbaugh in places like Los Angeles and Indianapolis. In each instance, Limbaugh exited a prosperous, longtime radio home and was forced to settle for an also-ran outlet with miniscule ratings.

Limbaugh's ongoing major market woes can be traced to his 2012 on-air meltdown over Sandra Fluke, where he castigated and insulted the graduate student for three days on his program, calling her a "slut" and suggesting she post videos of herself having sex on the Internet. (Fluke's sin in the eyes of Limbaugh was testifying before Congress in favor of contraception mandates for health care insurance.)

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[Carling]

Could be that the smaller stations bought the rights to Limbaugh's show to try an improve ratings, but that wouldn't fit into the insane mind of David Brock.

[Machiavelli]

Look at those ratings. Do you think Rush is worried?

[truth_seeker]

For many years, Rush would be on at home or in the car. Now almost not at all.

The GOP has lost the popular vote for 5 of the last 6 years during which Rush was considered to be a strong influence.

I grew tired of the perpetual victimhood meme. Listen to the same song too many times, and it grows old and boring.

Obviously that meme worked for Rush financially. But there is no evidence that it helped elect MORE conservatives to office.

YMMV

[Carling]

For many years, Rush would be on at home or in the car. Now almost not at all.

The GOP has lost the popular vote for 5 of the last 6 years during which Rush was considered to be a strong influence.

I grew tired of the perpetual victimhood meme. Listen to the same song too many times, and it grows old and boring.

Obviously that meme worked for Rush financially. But there is no evidence that it helped elect MORE conservatives to office.

YMMV

I discovered Rush while working on the grounds crew at Montana State University in Summer 1991 riding around in a watering truck.  I was in S&CJ/pre-law, and without him, I may have become just another liberal lawyer.  Instead, he woke up my critical thinking skills and skeptical side, and I really do owe him dearly for doing so.  Sure, I had to hide my beliefs a few times during college in order to not ruffle feathers on term papers, but Rush will always have a place as a role model for me. 

I don't listen very often anymore because of work obligations, but if I ever do get to meet the man, I will thank him for letting me hear a perspective on life I wasn't getting from my college professors. 

If listening to the same logical song for years is a bad thing, then I guess I'm a dullard.  One thing I KNOW when I do get to listen to him is that I know 100% what his beliefs are, and that he doesn't flip-flop in his core.  There is something unique and special about that sort of consistency for almost 25 years now.  There are many times where I've disagreed with Rush (the '94 shutdown where he was mocking private businesses hurting near Yellowstone Park was one of them, since I lived an hour from the Park), but that's fine with me as long as there is a belief rooted in conviction, and not in political expediency. 

[Carling]

Obviously that meme worked for Rush financially. But there is no evidence that it helped elect MORE conservatives to office.

There is evidence that he's helped elect more Republicans to office, though.  Since the '94 takeover, which the GOP actually helped credit Limbaugh with assisting, the balance of power in Congress has shifted dramatically than prior to when he was on-air.  No longer is the GOP a joke, at least in terms of numbers, and alternative media helped foster these gains.

Also, what's wrong with him making money?  Sounds like class envy to me.  He's at least not asking people for donations to keep his "conservative voice" operating, like the Con Man at TOS still does to this day.

Are you saying the GOP would be in a better place without conservative  talk radio and its pioneer, Rush Limbaugh?  I guess I don't understand your criticisms of him.  He's rich?  Is that it?

[truth_seeker]

There is evidence that he's helped elect more Republicans to office, though.  Before the '94 takeover, which the GOP actually helped credit Limbaugh with assisting, the balance of power in Congress has shifted dramatically than prior to when he was on-air.

Also, what's wrong with him making money?  Sounds like class envy to me.  He's at least not asking people for donations to keep his "conservative voice" operating, like the Con Man at TOS still does to this day.

Are you saying the GOP would be in a better place without conservative  talk radio and its pioneer, Rush Limbaugh?  I guess I don't understand your criticisms of him.  He's rich?  Is that it?

I was already conservative from the Reagan years. I didn't need Rush to convert me. He entertained me.

Maybe he did convert others. Fine with him making a lot of money. Politics is a lucrative industry, for officeholders, former officeholders, media.

I suppose I am cynical about the money-corruption angle.

[Machiavelli]

For many years, Rush would be on at home or in the car. Now almost not at all.

The GOP has lost the popular vote for 5 of the last 6 years during which Rush was considered to be a strong influence.

I grew tired of the perpetual victimhood meme. Listen to the same song too many times, and it grows old and boring.

Obviously that meme worked for Rush financially. But there is no evidence that it helped elect MORE conservatives to office.

YMMV

I think Rush's best years are behind him. I understand that his current contract is up next year. He'll be 65 - a good time for him to retire.

[ABX]

Look at those ratings. Do you think Rush is worried?

His AM, mid-day radio program has better ratings than most network prime time shows and has held those for 25+ years..

[jmyrlefuller]

Could be that the smaller stations bought the rights to Limbaugh's show to try an improve ratings, but that wouldn't fit into the insane mind of David Brock.

In this case, no.

What happened is that iHeartMedia (the network that owns Rush's show) is paying Rush somewhere between $40 and $50 million per year to carry his show because of the deal they signed with him in 2008. Part of that they make up through direct national advertising, but that only covers a small portion of the fees. The rest comes from iHeart selling the rights to the show to the 600 or so stations that carry him. The rights are VERY expensive—it's into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for most of the bigger stations. Those stations have to make up the money for the rights fee by keeping ratings for the station high and selling lots of advertising. The problem is that the whole Sandra Fluke boycott had an indirect effect. It didn't hurt Limbaugh directly; he was able to find new advertisers fairly easily. But when the huge list of companies started growing that wouldn't advertise during Limbaugh, eventually it led to whole stations being blacklisted. Advertisers wouldn't buy time on a station if there was any chance that a barter ad could be heard during his show. So, with ad revenue crippled, stations couldn't make up the cost of keeping a guy who is several times more expensive than even a local host would charge. Thus, iHeart had to step into these markets and put the shows on their own stations, forgo the licensing fee, and try to make up for it by keeping whatever local advertising they could scrounge themselves.

In Indianapolis and Boston (this case), Limbaugh was on heritage AM news/talk stations owned by other companies. The new stations are ones that iHeart owns and operates. In Indianapolis, it's a sports-talk station. In Boston, he actually moved to this station for a couple years not too long ago, but it was a ratings failure. Actually, Rush has been getting "demoted" to these types of stations in New York and Los Angeles for a couple years, and the ratings are showing a major decline from market-leader to also-ran. Right now, he's barely hanging on to the title of most-listened-to radio show in America, just ahead of NPR's Morning Edition, and that estimate comes from Talkers Magazine (which promotes the format as a whole) so it might be inflated. So it's a double whammy: lost ratings means lost local advertising, and lost rights fees for carrying the show on their own stations. iHeartMedia is probably eating quite a bit of a loss as of late for the show.

Limbaugh's contract with iHeart ends next year, and so does his affiliation agreement with Cumulus, a big station owner (35 of his stations are owned by Cumulus). It's not out of the realm of possibility that come the end of next year, he finds himself out of a job.

[DCPatriot]

Rush Limbaugh is a national treasure.  He's the most effective voice on the Right.

I hate to picture the United States today had he not been on the radio for the past 25+ years.

My main problem with him today is the quality of sponsors and the fact that he tries to fool his audience by making a commentary that turns out to be another commercial.  His last hour is a disaster in terms of quality listening.  Life-lock, IRS back tax assistance (which is really the IRS themselves getting people to innocently turn themselves in).  It's a joke.

But, being in my car driving 1K miles a week, I eagerly tune in every day at noon.

[jmyrlefuller]

His AM, mid-day radio program has better ratings than most network prime time shows and has held those for 25+ years..

That's the thing. He's running out of steam, not unlike David Letterman or perhaps Johnny Carson before him. It's pretty much inevitable that when one has to fill that much airtime, every day, with original content, things are going to get stale.

It's fine to look at what Limbaugh has done for the past 27 years and admire it, but at the same time acknowledge that even this must eventually come to an end, and with it, probably conservative talk radio as we know it.

The fears of mainstream advertisers have to be addressed if it is going to be a viable medium, and that means neutralizing the Media Matters agitators.

[sinkspur]

For many years, Rush would be on at home or in the car. Now almost not at all.

The GOP has lost the popular vote for 5 of the last 6 years during which Rush was considered to be a strong influence.

I grew tired of the perpetual victimhood meme. Listen to the same song too many times, and it grows old and boring.

Obviously that meme worked for Rush financially. But there is no evidence that it helped elect MORE conservatives to office.

YMMV

Really?  The GOP won the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.  Whether Rush helped or not will never be known.

Cheer up, man. The GOP is far from done.  Hell, the Democrats will not win the House for the next ten years, maybe longer. No matter who wins the White House, the House will be a boost or a check on them.