‘By falsifying numbers this way, liberals can kill talk radio’
Kathy Shaidle
WorldNetDaily
7/24/2011
At the beginning of this year, a rash of stories popped up in liberal media, promising that the death of conservative talk radio was imminent – and this time, the critics of hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage insisted, they had the hard numbers to prove it.
The critics had latched onto a story that appeared in Crain’s New York Business (a subscription-only newsletter), which announced: “A new Arbitron report shows Rush Limbaugh’s ratings down 33 percent from a year ago and Sean Hannity down 28 percent over the same time period.”
“Is right-wing talk dying?” John Avlon asked hopefully at The Daily Beast.
“Are we sick of Rush Limbaugh yet”? Alex Pareene asked at Salon.com, adding gleefully, “We might be!”
But how exactly did Rush Limbaugh lose one-third of his audience over 12 months?
According to Pareene and others, the answer was a 2008 change in how ratings-tracker Arbitron determines listenership, away from the survey system to the Portable People Meter…
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