[FrankR]

" repeated his talking point for the seventh or eighth time in the same segment."

Rush is a broadcasting professional, he knows what he is doing.

Radio is a very fleeting medium insofar as the manner in which people listen. Very few people sit and listen to a three, or even a one hour program. With radio you're in the car, out of the car. In the room, out of the room.

As a veteran of radio broadcasting I can attest that that fact is used regularly in the selling of radio time, therefore multiple commercials (spots) are recommended for advertisers. One of the main selling points for radio is that - unlike TV or print - you can be doing other things while you listen, i.e. driving, cleaning house, or even mowing the lawn.

As a listener, I might now hear any of Rush's show until I decided to get into the car at about 2pm and go somewhere, in that case repetition of the days topic(s) is invaluable and if it was not repeated, the point would be missed.

The only time I get bored with Rush is when he gets on football, or golf...neither of which interests me much.

Repetition is the key to most all broadcasting to get the message across. Unlike print, once the words are broadcast, it's difficult to go back and "read" them again for clarity, or better understanding.

Many, many times I've wished someone would invent a DVR-like device so I could rewind the last few minutes of a radio show I miss for being on the cellphone or stopping at the store.

One would almost have to sit directly in front of the radio with loud headphones to get every point made on any radio program. But then, you'd be really bored.

Rush is not be lax, he's just exercising what he knows about radio audiences and the very nature of radio.

I noticed you made no reference to the MSM repeating the TRavon story "talking points"ad infinitum on a daily basis...not to mention those GEICO commercials.

But the MSM knows the nature of broadcast audiences too.

[jiggyboy]

I’m not talking about repeating the same topic every couple of minutes for new listeners, I’m talking about the same talking point literally every minute for eight to ten minutes straight. (I happen to have been able to find the very segment here: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/04/09/maybe_sen_mccaskill_can_tell_us_why_we_need_thousands_of_irs_agents_to_provide_health_care , “Find Next Occurrence of” “IRS” until your mouse button stops working to see what I mean.)

I don’t want to hijack the thread, but I have some questions on radio and TV advertising that I’ve been wanting to ask somebody for quite some time.

1) What’s going on with showing the same commercial twice in the same commercial break, or even two times in a row? For a while, I thought my memory was shot, but now I see and/or hear this practically every day. Is this gross incompetence on somebody’s part, or some legal trickery (”you said to run your ad twice during the show, well we ran it twice”)? Is the American attention span now down to the life expectancy of a soap bubble?

2) In the old days, big advertisers (e.g., Campbell’s) wrote their contract so that no competitor’s ad would be on the opposite magazine page or in the same radio or TV commercial break. But these days I don’t know if I could say that there’s any company in the country that has that deal. Over Christmas, I saw TV commercials from four different car manufacturers in a row, then something else, then two more car ads. Why would an advertiser be in that environment?

Re DVR technology for radios, I often find myself lunging for a “rewind 30 seconds” button on my car radio as I immediately remember (over and over again!) that I actually had one. There are radios that let your record what’s being broadcast, but I haven’t found anything that also has that short-rewind button to let you hear it again while it’s recording.

The thread was on radio choice, so it never occurred to me to offer complaints about MSM repetition. That said, one of the things that will get me screaming is when they have only one five-second clip of some new event and play it virtually nonstop while their panel blathers on about the event. Court TV might be the worst — if they have some grainy, telephoto picture of the back of a guy’s head as he’s getting into a car, then that’s the picture they’ll slowly rotate and zoom on five, ten, fifteen times in a row during the segment.