...and that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh and the money behind Rush Limbaugh doesn't want to see happening. They were hoping something else would come up to divert our attention, and the radio message boards are full of confident Rush-boosters proclaiming "this will all blow over in no time."
Except...it hasn't, and all the attempts to create false equivalency (the Bill Maher talking point, for instance) haven't pulled the spotlight off Rush to any considerable extent.
Having said that, I don't even really want to be talking about Rush Limbaugh today. I'm very excited about what promises to be one of the first really hotly contested congressional races in my neck of the woods (Louise Slaughter versus Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks in the former NY-28) in a long time. I'll probably diary about that later, too, though it will slip off the Recent List unnoticed, no doubt.
But a good radio person knows exactly what the market wants ("play the hits," as the programming advice goes), and you want to know what's happening in Rush's World this week, don't you?
So...over the Calligraphy of Continuation we go, to learn why Rush isn't winning this week, either:
1. Today's "news" is not news
Let's get a couple of things out of the way quickly: first, the news that Mike Huckabee is challenging Rush isn't, of itself, "news." If you've been reading my dispatches from within the belly of the beast, you've known about this for a few weeks now.
To the extent that there's any real news today, it's that Cumulus is speaking out a little louder about its plans for the Huckabee show.
Cumulus, you see, is probably Rush Limbaugh's worst nightmare right now. When it bought Citadel Broadcasting last year, it acquired some of Rush's biggest affiliate stations: WABC in New York, WBAP in Dallas, WLS in Chicago, WMAL in Washington, WJR in Detroit and a few others, too. In an industry known for being run by cheapskates, Cumulus is as cheap as it comes. That $50 million paycheck Rush is allegedly getting from Premiere (aka Clear Channel)? Cumulus would never write a check that big.
Cumulus, as its CEO said in the news articles today, believes in "eating its own cooking." If they can create programming themselves instead of paying an outside vendor to do it, they will do it, even if the outside programming gets higher ratings.
There is no larger outside programming bill that Cumulus pays than the one to Premiere to carry the Rush Limbaugh show. People I respect in the business estimate that Cumulus probably pays somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-6 million a year just to carry Rush on its big stations. That's a big chunk of Rush's paycheck, especially when you assume that the "$50 million" figure is heavily inflated, which I do.
Cumulus actually makes up an even bigger chunk of Rush's payday when you consider that the ratings he gets from Cumulus' big markets are a very important part of the package Premiere sells to national advertisers. Take Rush off a big Cumulus signal and put him somewhere smaller and his ratings wither. (This actually happened in San Francisco, where Clear Channel took Rush off Cumulus-owned KSFO to put him on Clear Channel-owned KKSF, which is making only a small blip in the ratings.)
Rush losing the Cumulus stations - and he will, probably sooner rather than later - seriously damages the national reach of his show...and that's not even taking into account the radio "lemming effect" wherein smaller stations will follow the lead of the big guns like WABC and WLS.
2. I don't really care what Mike Huckabee's show will sound like. Neither should you.
Yeah, yeah, he's an insidiously "nice" conservative host, who can take the vilest of right-wing policies and wrap them up in a silky-smooth package, selling hate to listeners who'd never abide the open vitriol that comes from Rush on a daily basis.
True as that may be, it's largely irrelevant to Cumulus. The people who run Cumulus are not in business to be GOP true believers. They're in business to run their stations as cheaply and profitably as they possibly can. The same is true of the owners of probably 90% of the rest of Rush's affiliates around the country.
So, understand: Cumulus doesn't need Huckabee to get huge ratings. They don't need him to be the "next Rush Limbaugh." That's not the business they're in. All they need from him is to draw enough of an audience to be able to sell local and national ads in the show at a rate that allows them to make a healthy profit. If you assume that Huckabee's being paid somewhere in the mid-six figures to do the show (and even that may be on the high side), it really doesn't take much for Cumulus to profit from him in a way that they can't profit right now from Rush.
What's in it for Huckabee? Some have postulated that he thinks this is a good way to build visibility for a 2016 presidential bid. I don't see that. Sitting in front of a live national mike for 15 hours a week generates tremendous material for opponents to use against you, and even a smooth operator like Huckabee's going to slip up at some point.
3. What we're doing against Rush will end up hurting Huckabee's chances, too.
By using our free speech to tell Rush's supporters (the advertisers who pay to be associated with this program) what we think of their decisions, we are having a bigger effect on the world of talk radio than I would have even dared predict when this started a few weeks ago.
One of the reasons Limbaugh's show and talk in general got as big as it did in the 1990s was that it didn't require stations to pay much attention to it. You paid for Rush's show and took a few others through barter, and presto - instant ratings and revenue.
As long as we keep paying attention, they can't do that anymore.
Over on the front page, Joan quoted some of today's Taylor on Radio-Info column. The really juicy part, though, is this:
A note from a large agency shared with TRI says “unfortunately, due to the recent comments made by Mr. Rush Limbaugh, we are now required to place the name of the DJ/personality in each daypart, instead of the daypart name.” It goes on to say “Please send an updated copy of your station’s on-air staff.” And just for good measure, “this also includes weekends.” As one somewhat fatigued back-office worker tells TRI, “This is getting to be a whole lot of work.”Yup. It sure is. :)
And by making that happen, we have broken Rush's protective shell of inevitability. It is no longer a given that you have to have Rush to be the biggest talk station in your market. It is no longer even a given that having Rush on your airwaves will make you money. (Kossack kravitz has been tracking the spotload on New York's WABC each day, and it's hard to imagine that the ads they're still selling are even paying Premiere's tab for the show, never mind making any profit for the station.)
All of this is making it more expensive to run a talk station than it used to be. In the months to come, we'll start seeing some lower-rated stations peel away from the format if they can't make money on it any longer. That will hurt everyone in the format: not just Rush, but also Beck and Hannity and Levin and Savage and, yeah, Huckabee.
Rush's supporters would very much like to change the topic right about now, but it's not working. We are still talking about Rush Limbaugh, and every time we do, we make it that much harder for him to continue on with business as usual.