Nail, meet hammer. Here are the most recent ratings for KPOJ and those of its conservative competitors, KXL-FM (Lars Larson’s flagship), and KEX-AM, the local Rush outlet. Ratings periods reflect average quarter hour share of all listeners over the age of 6, for the months of September, October and November 2012:
KPOJ: 0.8, 1.4, 1.4
KXL-FM: 4.7, 4.8, 5.5
KEX-AM: 2.7, 3.3, 3.5
Not too many years ago, KPOJ was being hailed as “proof” that liberal talk radio could be successful. Some success. Clearly, lib talk wasn’t attracting an audience—or making money—in one of the most liberal cities in the country.
Even as a #3 sports station, KPOJ will be much better off. Fox supplies all the programming (for less than the morning comedian was making), and sports is a much easier sell than progressive talk.
On the down side, this type of crash and burn is why libs want to bring back the fairness doctrine and other restrictions on free speech (read: conservative media). If the Dims retake the House in 2014, look for the fairness doctrine to return, along with “stimulus” money for MSM companies.
There was a book called Censorship about how the libs are trying to get the Fairness Docrine back and it talked in the beginning about how Michael Moore publicized Lars Larson’s
phone number to a crowd of people and Lars and his family got harrassed BIG time by the haters.
On the messageboards, libs are saying under sports the station will fail. Wrong. In fact even if numbers are the same or even less, it can still make money by running
national ads. Sports works, not so much liberal talk.