“You give him one little break and he’ll be off talking about football or golf and a heartbeat”.
Michael Savage is a lot worse than Rush for talking trivial nothing. He’ll go on and on and on about vitamins and how to grow a garden, or his personal stories from the Bronx. I quit listening to Savage a long time ago for that very reason.
The way things are they wanted to at least get his show on air somehow so the ads could be run. WRKO found the ratings it got wouldn’t justify renewing—$500k/yr plus another $700k in lost “barter” ad spots. WMEX is being leased by some folks from NC who couldn’t afford him. WBZ runs talk at night—local—but news by day. So iHeart had to convert a Spanish language station to talk so Rush, Sean and Glenn could be heard. They tried it before with WXKS 1200 in 2010 including local hosts but had a tough time making money and now they lease 1200 to Bloomberg who runs financial talk.
In 2008 iHeart, then known as Clear Channel paid Rush $38 million per yr for 8 years and a signing bonus made it effectively $50M per year. They did it because Rush made them a lot of money. He still does and still has well over 500 affiliates I think.In many cities stations can afford him (it goes by market size) but it was tough to do in Boston. Yeah a liberal town—the NPR stations do well—but what does it say about progressive talk that a)stations wouldn’t run it on their own fearing low ratings and b) someone had to buy time to put it on. In Boston!!
Air America was a miserable flop; they tried to do their own “Rush” with Al Franken. In 04 Air America predicted they, like Rush, would have about 500 stations too in about 5 years. They even got Clear Channel to run it in places like Boston (1200, 1430) and Prov. (920). Soon it went away—the prog. dir of 920 in RI said “the Air America experiment is over” and flipped to conservative talk.
Many people listen online these days anyway, at work.
I sure hope he has someone monitoring here. He definitely needs to step up his game, for sure.