Rush's slow downfall continues

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Quite on topic for the monthly topic, comes this.

Rush Limbaugh’s Death Spiral Continues As He Gets Demoted To Low Rated Boston Station

To summarize. The good news for Rush: just a month after being notified he was getting the boot by his Boston talk radio host station, the talker has a new AM home in the city (a liberal stronghold, btw). The bad news: the station currently boasts a meager 0.6 rating, trails 4 non-commercial stations on the market, and is basically yet another big-city, cellar-dwelling outpost that Limbaugh is forced to call home.

Basically, it's another stage along his long slide down the spiral into obscurity. I reckon Limbaugh's rant against that woman who he disagreed with on birth control has ultimately hurt him beyond repair. Him sitting there calling her a slut for 2-3 days in a row turned off a lot of his advertisers, and ever fewer young people and women listen to his show these days. Now most advertisers have excluded Limbaugh's show from their portfolio, and for a reason. Similarly to Hannity's case. I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back. And once the advertisers bail, well it's just a matter of time before a show, any show, loses steam and fades away. The Invisible Hand has spoken yet again. Quite ironically, in his case.

Of course, he only has himself to blame for this, largely because of his idiocy, and because he didn't know where to stop treading across the line. I guess the only reason they put him on another station, however weak, is to say he's still in the Boston market. Which ain't much, anyway.

That said, it's been impressive and rather sad that Rush has had the audience that he does. Then again, he has done a morbidly fascinating job at mastering the business model of making a decreasing demographic increasingly scared and/or angry at political opposition.

Comments

[oportet.livejournal.com]

The bouncing ball will keep bouncing back, but never as high.

I think it happened with Stern after Columbine, Imus after the 'nappy ho's' thing, and maybe someone else who made a poorly thought out remark after 9/11 - but I can't recall who.

Another way to look at it is - maybe the ratings and advertisers were already going, or about to be going, the wrong way - so the show needed to be shocked back into relevance. The shock just didn't work.

[garote]

I remember Bill Maher got the boot after saying something about the 9/11 hijackers... But now he's got a well-known HBO show. I don't know enough about the metrics to say whether he's doing better or worse.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Idiocy sells well anywhere. Even if it's not Rush, someone else will fill that niche sooner or later. There cannot be vacuum in the market of stupid for too long.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's more because the Boston talk radio landscape is dominated by sports and local AM (we have WBZ and a local public radio station, the former of which can sometimes be heard as far south as Washington DC), and that many of these hosts like Hannity and Limbaugh can be heard on stations that can be heard in Boston (stations on Cape Cod, in Worcester, and Manchester NH can all be heard in various areas in the Greater Boston Area).

So it's no surprise that stations that can sustain a more conservative radio presence locally are carrying Rush and company while the big city stations opt for more profitable endeavors in this case. If Rush and company couldn't be heard at all, that would be one thing, but it's basically not the case.

Radio ratings are in decline across all genres and markets. Satellite radio hurt things somewhat, but the fact that you can pair a bluetooth phone to your stereo very easily, or just use an auxiliary cord, means a lot of the captive audience is gone. It's the audio version of cord cutting, and that probably matters more to the talk radio bottom line (why am I going to listen to 40 minutes of talk radio programming and 20 minutes of unskippable commercials when I can get twice the content commercial free on my phone?) than whether Rush Limbaugh called someone a slut for a few days.