Rush gone from WRKO

Bob DeMattia bob.bosra@demattia.net
Fri May 22 11:53:43 EDT 2015


Fox News has two components: - news and opinion shows.  The opinion shows
seem to get
the most attention.  They are primarily conservative, but there are
exceptions:
Greta Van Sustren seems to have both left and right views.

Their 6 PM news show to be pretty even.

It seems the folks that like to call it "Faux News" tend to focus on the
most
extreme hosts.  The same could be said about the MSNBC opinion shows, except
there's no clever way to make "MSNBC" sound like a word for "fake". MSNBC
bills
itself as a "progressive" network.  Their only non-liberal host is on at 6AM
in the morning.

Fox has far superior ratings to MSNBC (at least in total numbers).  This
mirrors
the AM talk show experience of liberal vs. conservative.  I think part of
this
is that at least on television, conservative viewers see most of the
networks as
having a liberal bias.  This causes them to congregate on one channel.
Those
who don't feel that way are distributed amongst CNN, CNNHN, MSNBC, and a
host of
others.  Younger views who tend to be liberal aren't watching straight news
at all.

What is surprising is no other network has decided to take on Fox
head-to-head.
Are news organizations so biased that it overrides business decisions?
This is
difficult to believe.  Is the demographic for conservative news television
so
skewed that the other networks would have a smaller audience for which
there
are more advertisers?  No one seems to have come up with a definitive
answer.

-Bob






On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Bob Nelson <raccoonradio@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sports is indeed what's hot. As for Mr. Carr, he may not necessarily have
> gone national but he now has two dozen affiliates at this point (including
> new stations in Manchester NH, Lowell, Pittsfield, and New Bedford) and
> while he had to go crawling back to WRKO (now an affiliate, not his
> employer) they had to kind of go crawling back to him when their PMD
> ratings went down.
>
> Rush started as a DJ at a station in Cape Girardeau, MO and did stints at
> two Pittsburgh stations. "Faux News" as some call it does well in the
> ratings for night time shows at least, but maybe because they have all of
> the Right to themselves. Shockingly, MSNBC has been rumored to be shifting
> to the right after their ratings hit historic lows. When a "liberal answer
> to Rush", Air America, started in 2004, their Jon Sinton predicted "in five
> years we'll have 500 stations". Instead they went out of business.
>
> On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 8:16 AM, Rob Landry <011010001@interpring.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 21 May 2015, Karen McTrotsky wrote:
> >
> >  Limbaugh is done, much like Mr. Carr who had to eat his words because
> >> there just isn't much of a market for his routine any longer. Rush
> founders
> >> in his own irrelevance and in the irrelevance of AM broadcasting.  He's
> run
> >> his course.  The trouble for the syndicator, thorugh, is there's
> nothing to
> >> replace him.
> >>
> >
> > Sports talk. That appears to be the future of talk radio, at least in the
> > near term.
> >
> > AM broadcasting and FM broadcasting aren't particularly different. It's
> > the content that matters. Where there is something on AM radio worth
> > listening to, people listen to it. Where there is not, people ignore it.
> >
> > The problem is, I think, that many broadcasters are too deeply in debt to
> > be able to afford the talent they need to attract and keep an audience.
> > They have forgotten that radio is show business, and air talent is what
> > draws people to listen. You can't substitute machines for artists, nor
> can
> > you take a random person off the street and make him or her a star.
> >
> > Consider all the people who've tried to compete with Rush Limbaugh over
> > the years, including big name politicians like Fred Thompson and Mike
> > Huckabee. They all failed. Limbaugh, who started as a local DJ in
> > (Missouri? I forget) had the talent to succeed in radio where they did
> not.
> >
> > There are AM radio stations that are nurturing local talent. WSRO's
> Frilei
> > Bras and Leandrinho Moura are doing an amazing job connecting to their
> > listeners; the enthusiasm and excitement they generate can be felt in
> their
> > shows even if you don't understand a word of what they say ("I'm on a
> > Brazilian, wo-wo, radio..."), and the station is getting noticed, both by
> > political leaders and by major advertisers. No, AM is not dead yet.
> >
> >
> > Rob
> >
>


More information about the Boston-Radio-Interest mailing list