As the vast majority of Americans have never been polled, so the vast majority of Americans have never made their viewing or listening habits public knowledge through the ratings systems. In radio there is Arbitron and in TV, the Nielsens. The politicians and their staffs live and die by the polls as the professional talkers go on air and off by the ratings, just ask Keith Olberman (if you can find him). The dealers in brouhaha, have a moist, delicious controversy on their plates. The most coveted delicacy, a Rush of Limbaugh seems to be within reach of their forks, knives and fingers. Who could expect them not to tuck in? The implements for cracking the shell and exposing the delicious Limbaugh underneath are many but one is foremost. The ratings and for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks and Mitt Romney is hurtling towards Washington; it’s where the money is.

A Cenk Uygur is on the case. Heck, they all are, but this character who could not reveal his Easter Island head in public if we didn’t know where Mohammed Atta is, shows up foremost on Bing. Statistically you are unlikely to know the name as this Delta smelt of media barely registered in the ratings system when he was on MSNBC of which you may also be blissfully ignorant. The Young Turk has landed on his feet after being replaced by Al Sharpton. He has, like Olberman and Algore, carved out a place for himself on the internets at CurrenTV, from which perch he assails Limbaugh’s much vaunted audience claims as phony-baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n roller codswallop. Since this is an attempt at media nose-punching we should weigh in the contenders. Uygur asserts that he and Limbaugh may well be in the same class. He refers us to his youtube channel where, at my viewing, nearly all the vids have almost exactly 300 pageviews with one exception. His manly challenge to Rush has ten thousand.

Cenk denounces Limbaugh as a “paper tiger”. His ratings are not ratings at all! By this he means that there is no national radio survey, rather national estimates are agglomerated through local market testing. And how is that done? Until ’07 or so by the laughably uncertain means of Arbitron diaries; that is folks are sent little black books in which they record their listening history. On this I can do a bit of first-hand reporting. I was an Arbitron participant right around the time Limbaugh was coming to prominence. Randomly I was identified by phone and sent a diary with a modest stipend, bit less than $10 as I recall, which is why I claimed to be the head of a radio-listening household of four. My compensation covered the bar tab while I set to my project, not of recording my consumption which consisted purely of the college radio station I was on, but rather filling out the books with what I thought my fictional Arbitron Bunch might like as well as high-brow programming I felt a civic duty to promote. Opera and public affairs programs reaped the ratings rewards. Ignorant of AM myself, the local affiliate favored by my beloved auntie drew powerful numbers. How many hours are in a day again? People listen to the radio while sleeping, yes? Sure, that counts. Or would, if it were not all bollocks. So we can agree with Mr Uygar of the Steppes. The ratings were fraudulent. In that banner year of ’07 a bit of technology sprang to the rescue with the Portable People Meter which listens as you listen, detecting subsonic codes and recording precisely what you hear. This new methodology did indeed trim Limbaugh’s numbers last year. That fact was flogged by reliable Rushfoes but it is a tricky business for one ratings whore to question the takings of another. There could be collateral damage. Black 0r “Urban” radio stations, for instance, took a tremendous hit as well. It seems hip-hop pop is not as big a seller as the broadcasters would want igniting claims that the gadgets are, you guessed it, racist. Non-english stations also saw their official audiences trimmed as did NPR. Whoo! Better keep the lid on that! Cenk also observes that the audience numbers may be skewed by double-counting, a curious complaint from a guy who’s own numbers go up with the click of anyone’s mouse, any number of times  (like, say, 300?) but for the ad rates, da money, that is not really material. Repeat listenership is still exposure to the ads.

Given all the givens we can stipulate to Cenk’s complaint and come to a compromise figure one half of Limbaugh’s biased claim; a nice round ten million unique listeners in a week tuning in for some substantive fraction of his fifteen broadcast hours. Ten million. Of which, yes, I am a reliable Army of One since  my involuntary retirement but Limbaugh is not Appointment Radio (as he puts it) for me. That honor goes only to the fiery Mark Levin. Politics aside, and I could chronicle serious disagreements with the man, this is a media titan; a gas giant, a super-massive blackhole. By any per capita measure he is the biggest thing there is by several orders of magnitude. American Idol drew seven million this week being, as usual, the most watched show so even our cropped figure for Limbaugh leaves him the big winner but that barely begins to tell the tale. The most watched television event to date was the last Superbowl. 111 million people worldwide viewed the game, a crushing defeat for Limbaugh, right? Yes, certainly he wept salty tears in his skybox until remembering that sporting events, movies, television, cable shows and even pornos are the industrial products of numberless, ah, hands. Limbaugh’s product has one source, apparently limitless. That is his copious cigar-hole. As he likes to remind us when, as lately, he is under attack from media munchkins, captains of industry, government, academia and the semi-pro hordes of RusHaters, he is literally Just a Guy on the Radio. He gives away his thoughts, however expressed, and then sells the excess attention he finds lying around in the dust. Such it is with all media (excepting subscriber services) but everyone else’s impact must be divided by the number of worker-bees in front of or behind cameras and mics while the EIB Network uses a denominator of One. In this more literal sense, Limbaugh’s numbers, unlike Uygar’s mouseclicks are Real Numbers. They are Whole Numbers. They truly reflect that in any week at least 3% of America has heard the voice of Rush Limbaugh, said voice almost solely pontificating on public affairs.

His fans listen to him. His enemies listen to him. Entire lucrative careers have been made largely by criticizing him. Books, magazines and of course numerous radio imitators seek the slenderest reasons for mentioning his name because, as we saw even in Uygar’s untraveled corner of the internets, those three dulcet syllables Rush Limbaugh are the closest thing to a magic incantation we know in the media industry. Even a media paramecium like Yours Truly can, perhaps, hopefully, draw sustenance in his wake; sending out the echo of his name to the searchbots of allies, enemies and commercial aggregators drawing precious, finite attention to my own wares, like his, of clear thoughts frankly, sometimes humorously expressed. If a Big Wheel like Cenk Uygar can do it, why should I refrain? Maybe I’ll even make 300 hits like the Young Turk. But Limbaugh, no matter what you hear, is not going anywhere unless he goes the way of Andrew Breitbart.

As for me, my traffic is WAY up. Thank you, megaheads.

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