According to Cooke, the StopRush movement has resulted in hundreds of blue-chip national advertisers basically not only to wander away from Rush Limbaugh and "some of the other righties", but they’ve abandoned the Talk radio format entirely.
With the latest round of ratings just emerging, Cooke revealed that, in the largest markets, Limbaugh's stations are in terrible shape.
#radio ratings - and just-fielded research:
#RushLimbaugh now big-in-small-markets, small-in-big-markets.
AUDIO: http://t.co/QLwrYj7c7I
— Holland Cooke (@HollandCooke) April 17, 2014
Tom's Take: If indeed Rush is sitting at the kids' table, is it really because of the StopRush effort or perhaps it's because of listener fatigue and/or because most of Rush's station are AM?
Transcript:
Ed: Where is talk radio in all of this? There have been some shiftings taking place when it comes to the conservative lineup which, of course, dominates the spoken word format in our industry and there are some changes. I’m not taking any shots here. There simply are some numbers shifting and some changes. Holland, what are they?
HC: Well, I’m tempted to say, “Let’s go to the videotape” because you and I have been talking about this on TV as long ago as a year and change. The conversation really picked up on February 29, 2012, Leap Year Day which was Day 1 of this three-day Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke faux pas. And, if we were studying the history of talk radio, you stick a pin in the timeline there because at that moment, a very well organized and relentless advertiser boycott effort which remains underway today, rendered that business inviable.
Hundreds of blue-chip national advertisers basically have not only wandered away from Rush Limbaugh and some of the other righties, they’ve abandoned the format entirely. They are afraid to be heard on a news talk station because this man’s use of his free speech triggered the opposing viewpoint exercising THEIR right to free speech.
The boycotters are speaking and using the marketplace to say, “ENOUGH!” So as a consequence of all of this, the very company that owns, for instance, The Rush Limbaugh Show, which owns a bunch of great big talk stations has actually demoted him to smaller talk stations in two really big markets. You and I did an Ed Show about this at the time. In Los Angeles and San Francisco they moved him aside because his continuing presence was making it tough to make a go of it with the big stations.
So he was told to go sit at the kid’s table and the irony in this is that for years the radio righties have been cackling about progressive radio’s failure to attain their level of listenership while the radio lefties had to go sit at the kid’s table. Well now he’s there. And we just got the first round of monthly radio ratings yesterday. Tomorrow we’re gonna get Boston, Detroit, Miami, San Diego.
But yesterday we got New York, and Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Chicago and Dallas and some of the other big markets. And it is stunning to say this when we think that Rush Limbaugh himself led this whole talk radio revolution back in 1990. But today Rush Limbaugh is on the Number 22 station in New York. He is on the number 37 station in Los Angeles. In New York, four of the stations that are beating his station are not even English language stations.
The Rush Limbaugh station in New York is getting beat by a station that plays classical music. In Los Angeles where you might expect it, there are 11 non-English speaking stations beating Rush Limbaugh. And guess what? In both markets, the station that he just left in January is now up slightly over where it was when he left.
Now as you said, I think graciously at the beginning here, there’s a lot of change underway and people are going to have to sort this out and find where their voices went. In Detroit Sean Hannity was on mighty WJR which you can get in about 22 states at night. And now he’s on a 1400 am that doesn’t have nearly as big a footprint. So he’s gonna be disadvantaged there.
And wherever these changes are taking place against human nature because radio listening is habit and we have presets. And you may end up liking the guy who replaced them better than the guy you can’t find any more.
So the short answer is talk radio as we know it, the crazy uncle righty politically monologue-based I’m right you’re wrong genre is mathematically in trouble.
ED: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, all down.
HC: Yeah. How about in Chicago? Rush Limbaugh is on a great big station there. It is number 19 in the ratings and he didn’t move there. Same in Dallas. He is on the same great big station he always has been so they don’t have to go find him. And that station is now number 21 in the ratings. The station that Sean Hannity vacated for in Dallas is number 29 in the ratings. Obviously this is gonna shake out some more. The Rush Limbaugh station hasn’t changed in Philadelphia. They’re number 17 in the ratings.
So patterns emerge. And one of the patterns is that he is still a big act in small markets. It’s just looking like he is turning into a small act in big markets.
ED: And you do believe that it started with the Sandra Fluke ...
HC: That really revved it up. But there were a lot of trends already in motion. The biggest of which is demographic. Nobody is gonna stop this. There are 95 million millenials who just don’t go for the crazy uncle act and don’t crave confrontation. This is not their fare.
And then again there’s how long can any act stay hot? Okay? Over the years, have you noticed something? It hasn’t happened. All the stuff that Limbaugh and his legion of followers, all the Rush wannabes, have been preaching out, hasn’t happened. Their guys don’t get elected President, the stock market is now over 16,000 and they want to call this President’s economy a failure. You would have thought that if they had it right lo these many years that somebody would have listened.
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