Rush Limbaugh – Fake Callers, Fake Audience
July 11, 2012
By Nathaniel Downes


One of the common refrains in the media world is that Rush Limbaugh has
the largest audience in talk radio. He is eager to capitalize on this,
multiple times per episode in fact. But how true is this claim?

Limbaugh is one of several radio hosts syndicated through Premiere Radio
Networks, including right-wing darlings such as Sean Hannity and Glenn
Beck as well as known liberal voices such as Randi Rhodes and the
Reverend Jesse Jackson. One of the features for Premiere syndicated
shows is a service Premiere On Call, a phone banking service for voice
talent. What this means is, they hire people to call in. If you ever
listened to one of the shows distributed by Premiere, you may find
yourself impressed at how a caller would bring up a subject which then
the host would have a perfect response to, like a perfect pitch in a
baseball game to allow the home run hit. Premiere On Call’s hiring
standards appear to be focused on hiring people able to generate
accents, vocal inflections, or other ways to enable re-use of the same
voice actor multiple times without being identified as such.

Limbaugh obtained the largest audience during an era when audience count
was made by manually filled out diaries, a practice which has been
slowly phased out over the past few years, as detailed electronic
tracking became available. Once the detailed tracking was available,
Rush’s ratings dropped significantly, by over a third. With an estimated
weekly audience of 15 million users now, that comes to an average of
less than 3,000 listeners per station, not very good ratings at all. For
comparison, left-wing giant Ed Schultz on Jones Radio Network sports an
estimated 8,000 listeners per station. To get these numbers, we took the
totals given from Talkers Magazine and cross-referenced with the number
of stations that carry each show. Rush is carried on over 10x as many
stations as Big Eddie. Even though Rush’s overall listenership is high,
the number per station is low.


Rush’s claims for greatness comes from his large audience, but the large
audience is diluted over the sheer number of stations which carry him
resulting in actually very little per-station participation. This means
lower revenue for the stations themselves, and is very possibly the
reason for the mass exodus of advertisers on his show. He gained these
stations originally due to an arrangement system whereby these stations
were given his show, for free, in exchange for 15 minutes of advertising
space. It was a win-win for these small stations, effectively adding
filler to the stations airwaves in a non-prime spot.

With the more accurate ratings coming out showing that Limbaugh is only
getting 15 million listeners per week, and not the millions more he once
proclaimed were his, and the realization that his show is only carried
on stations due to the fact that it is free, one has to wonder how big
his ratings really are. The Young Turks Cenk Uygur even made a $10,000
bet with Rush to prove his ratings, which has not yet been taken up.
$10,000 sure could buy a lot of Oxycontin or even cover the alimony for
his four ex-wives.