#Break: Rush Limbaugh may leave Cumulus politico.com/blogs/media/20… via @politicoLooks like young Dylan got him a Scoop! With anonymous source and all, and writing it up like he's reading it off his Hildy Johnson Junior Journalist Secret Decoder Ring:
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) May 6, 2013
The Rush Limbaugh Program is considering ending its affiliation agreement with Cumulus Media at the end of this year, a move that would bring about one of the biggest shakeups in talk radio history, a source close to the show tells POLITICO.Son of a gun! How did that happen, O source close to the show?
According to the source, Limbaugh is considering the move because Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey has blamed the company's advertising losses on Limbaugh's controversial remarks about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student.Personal disclosure: My name undoubtedly figures among the petitions to various advertisers asking them to dump the Rushster, so I'm getting a little quiver of We Built That. So is he [jump]
taking responsibility, then, and offering, like a radio host of the later Roman Republic, to fall as it were on his microphone?
 |
| Busted in Jefferson City, Mo. Photo by Julie Smith/AP, via ABC News. Sculptor uncredited (really! at least in the ABC story) |
Not quite and to the contrary! El Rushbo is, according to that very accommodating source close to the show, in something of a snit about it:
The source close to the show described Dickey's remarks about advertising revenue as unjustified, and said such "criticism" of Limbaugh had resulted in the consideration to leave the company.Now we do not know, dearly beloved, why Cumulus has been losing money, or for that matter how much:
The true extent of Limbaugh's effect on Cumulus's advertising revenue is not known. In an August 2012 earnings call, Dickey said Cumulus's top three stations had lost $5.5 million, in part because of the boycott. In a March 2013 earnings call, Dickey said the company's talk radio side had "been challenged... due to some of the issues that happened a year ago." Nevertheless, Limbaugh remains the most highly rated talk radio host in the country.But I have the funniest feeling I do know what just happened at Politico, which is that young Dylan just got hit by a preemptive strike, in the form of a call from a source who may have been so close to the show that it was comparably rotund and cigar-happy.
My thought is that Limbaugh is in fact in the process of getting the sack from Cumulus, because of a devastating Rushblow to ad revenues, and would prefer that we all try not to think of it that way. So he is out announcing ahead of time (just barely—the company's next earnings call is Tuesday, and Mr. Dickey will apparently have something unpleasant to say about Limbaugh yet again) that no, as a matter of fact, it is he that is firing them. For lèse-majesté. Not, of course, announcing it in person, just getting it heard.
And who better to spread the news the way he wants it spread, conveying the exact opposite of the truth, than somebody at D.C.'s premier celebrity mag, the savants of the savvy, and a writer so dependent on stenography to find out what a story is that he once memorably said,
We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.
 |
| From The Nest Boutique. |
