Grab a coffee and enjoy FREE audio and webcam highlights from the week in conservative talk radio!
- Mark Steyn sits in for Rush
- Glenn Beck’s new venture: a publishing imprint partnership
- Mark Levin remembers his dog, Pepsi
CLICK HERE for more!
PLUS — Jeffrey Lord deconstructs the latest “conservative talk radio is dying” meme.
He explains that if “conservative talk radio’s ratings are dropping,” there are two reasons:
One: streaming audio, online listening and satellite radio aren’t included in radio ratings — and fans of Rush & Co. are increasingly listening in these formats, not when the show is airing live, on an old fashioned physical radio. I know that’s how I listen.
Two: race.
Does anything in American NOT have something to do with race? Har.
As reported in the New York Daily News back in December of 2009, Arbitron was threatened by New York Congressman Edolphus Towns over its Portable People Meter (PPM). The PPM, a small pager-like device that can be carried with ease, was hailed at the time as a new and more accurate way to measure radio ratings. When PPM burst onto the scene, the ratings for talk radio exploded. What took a dive in listenership ratings were urban and Hispanic formats. Towns, then the chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, was furious. So too was House Judiciary chair and Democrat John Conyers, who organized a hearing on the matter, charging that the PPM system was discriminating against minorities. (…)
Talk radio targets households making $75,000 or above. Participants in talk radio ratings surveys are paid $50 a month, not exactly a financial incentive if you are in this income demographic. But in the wake of the Towns/Conyers allegations — which in fact involved a lack of participation by minority communities at the lower end of the economic scale — something is said by this source to have changed to encourage that participation. The change? Pay more money to would-be participants. How much? The source is unclear but has been told personally the amount can be up to as much as $200 a month per household participant. If you have, say, 6 people in the household — a household with an annual income of not $75,000 but $36,000 — that’s an extra $1200 a month.
What happened after this sequence of events? You got it. The financially struggling urban and Hispanic radio formats magically “returned” — and the talk radio formats magically began to turn in lower rating numbers.