Rush To Wishful Thinking

Rush Limbaugh called Hurricane Irma a hoax and also called it a story that was deliberately overhyped to promote Al Gore's climate change agenda.  Another Al who believes in climate change - that would be Al Roker, the NBC weatherman - called Limbaugh's statement dangerous and counterproductive.  Then Rush had to evacuate his own home in Florida.  So liberals have decided, given this humiliation, that Limbaugh's long and peculiar career as a right-wing political commentator is over.

Yeah, about that . . .

I remember folks saying that Limbaugh was finished when, in 2012, he attacked Sandra Fluke, the law school student who achieved fifteen minutes of fame by defending contraception in a congressional hearing and then in 2014 ran for a seat in the California State Senate, and how numerous advertisers were pulling ad accounts from his show.  Talk-radio consultant Holland Cooke noted on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show that Limbaugh's show was migrating from AM radio stations with strong signals to AM stations with weaker signals.  The sun was finally setting on conservative political talk radio and talk radio in general.  Ed Schultz himself was getting out of the talk-radio business and going only to podcasts.  A new media era was dawning . . .

It was a mirage.  After the Fluke fluke, Rush's ratings did change. They continued to go up.  Here are some unfortunate numbers courtesy of Wikipedia: Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates Rush's show, and iHeartMedia - formerly Clear Channel Communications, the company with which he signed his contract - noted in 2016 that Rush's audience grew 18 percent among adults 25-54 and experienced even more growth with women in the same age group - 27 percent.  How do you think Donald Trump got elected President?  Meanwhile, Limbaugh hardly needs to worry about any of the advertisers who bailed out on him in 2012 over Sandra Fluke.  With a reported ad revenue growth of 20 percent year over year, he'll continue to make a lot of money for the advertisers who stood by him - and, coincidentally, for himself.  Maybe that's why his 2008 contract with iHeart - set to expire this year - was renewed in advance last year through 2020, keeping him on the national airwaves for 32 years, longer than Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show."

Oh yeah, a Zogby 2008 poll found that Rush Limbaugh was the most trusted "news personality" in America, with one of eight respondents giving him a thumbs-up over numerous news personalities who are actual reporters and editors.  Walter Cronkite, in pace requiescat.

Limbaugh has since tried to spin the media's negative reaction to his Irma statements by saying that he never told anyone not to evacuate and that his remarks were taken out of context.  Incredible, but people will believe him.  Meanwhile, Sandra Fluke, who lost her bid for office, lived up to her surname, and Ed Schultz, long gone from MSNBC, is a discredited hack working at RT America as an apologist for Vladimir Putin.  (I neither know nor care what Holland Cooke is up to.)  Unless the Communications Act of 1996, which put terrestrial radio in the hands of fewer people and dictates who and what we get to listen to even if don't like what we get, is repealed, get used to the future of American talk radio looking more like the hideous and godawful present, only more so.