Rush Limbaugh should be the next President and Howard Stern should clean the White House toilet.
[overwhelmingly female and moderate/liberal] felt that talk radio format lacked balance.
That means they don't like that they don't totally control it, like just about all the other media.
Except that AM and FM listeners can't listen to Stern anymore.
Who's the talk show host that works for Ruth's Chris Steakhouse?
:)
I find this rather odd. First of all, Sirius has a grand total of about six million subscribers. Even if every single one of them tuned in for Sterns show every single day, there must be a dozen or more nationally syndicated radio hosts who boast a higher audience. Rush generally brings in 15-20 million a day, so how is it that Stern is still a dominating factor in talk radio?
Because of Stern, I will never, ever, ever, send one dime to Sirrus.
It has nothing to do with ratings.
Stern before he went to satellite was runing about 4 or 5 million listeners. Rush has about 15 million, Hanity has about 13 million, many conservative talk show hosts had better ratings than Stern.
A lot more people know Larry King's name but his audience is about 1/3 of O'Reilly's.
In an interesting but meaningless coincidence, Stern and Limbaugh share the same birthday.
I get the impression that this survey lumps two distinctly different talk show genres into one category: you have the conservative talk shows that we all know about--Rush, Hannity, et.al., and you have the "whacky" morning DJ talk show, which is heavy on juvenile humor and repetition.
They're lumping the apples with the oranges here, IMO.
a couple of observations.....
- Liberal talk stations keep crashing-and-burning in the ratings when compared to stations with conservative or mostly conservative lineups. (if there is concern about a lack of balance, you certainily could never determine that from the workings of the marketplace)
- Local hosts appear to be a vanishing breed, so it does not appear that there is a sudden outcry for those either.
(usually you hear that when the station goes all syndicated/automated, or files with the FCC to move to another city, suddenly making local service an issue)
- They appear to be defining "conservative" as right-leaning political talk shows like Rush, Hannity, etc. Would not seem to take into account Christian programming, and talk shows about non-political subjects (car talk, hunting shows, etc.) that tend to attract a conservative audience.
All in all I'd say that conservatives are dominating talk radio on all fronts, save for NPR.
I wish there were more West Coast Conservatives! I like listening to Michael Medved's program, but usually have to turn it off due to the wretched west-coast Socialist rabble that keeps calling in!