Top Stories at the New York Times

RUSH: I want to tell you — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — how proud I am of you. My dear audience, I’m so proud of you people, how nice you are, how loyal you are. But mostly, what makes me swell with pride is how informed you are. I would put you up against any audience of any news source. I don’t care, put it on radio, put it on television, put it in print, and especially you are so much more informed than readers of the New York Times, and I cannot tell you, both personally and professionally, how much pride I have in that. This has been documented by the Pew Center for People in the Press. You have been rated the most knowledgeable and informed audience in all of broadcast media. Now, let’s go back to last week, just as an illustration of this. If I were to ask you what were the most important news items of the month of July, right up there probably near the top, if not numero uno itself would be the op-ed in the New York Times by the two guys from Brookings which said, ‘Hey, we might be able to win this thing. The surge is working.’ And it appeared where? It appeared in the New York Times.

I read, told you about it, and I’m sure you’ve read it. I’ll bet you there isn’t anybody at the New York Times, maybe Jim Rutenberg, who listens to this program, for example. But we expose ourselves to what they are doing, a war we just might win. That probably, especially in the last week of the month of July, if I were to take a survey of you, this audience, I’m sure it would be at the top of the list if not close. Now, what did New York Times readers think were the most important stories? The Times, if you go to their website, will tell you which of their stories are the most read articles of the month. Do you know what the number one — according to the Times — the number one most read article of the month in their newspaper and on their website was? ‘An epic showdown as Harry Potter is initiated into adulthood.’ That’s the number one story in the New York Times website. That’s what they say about their own website. The Harry Potter book, number one. But it gets better. The number two most read, distributed story, New York Times, ‘Summer express, 100 simple meals ready in ten minutes or less.’ I am not making this up. Number three, top-read story, New York Times, a $135 million home. But if you have to ask if the class warfare crowd wants to read about $135 million estates, of course they do. The number four most read story in the New York Times, according to their own website, letters from an 18-year-old Hillary Rodham to her then-boyfriend.

Nowhere in the top five of the New York Times’ most-read stories is that column, ‘We Just Might Win in Iraq.’ They claim to have the newspaper of record. They claim to have their pulse on all the news that’s fit to print. But I’ll tell you, if that’s what their audience on their website is reading, in that order and what they consider to be the most important, what they’re passing around, and I have to tell you, folks, we are so far ahead of the game, I can’t tell you how proud of you I am, because I know that if I were able to take a survey much like this — andI’m not going to count our website. On our website we have the top four, top five rank, I think it’s top ten, and I haven’t even looked to see what they are, but it’s not quite the same thing. I looked at this, what the Times’ readers think is the most important, and I was excited, because I know they have a mindless, really mindless, just holes in-their-head audience. And I don’t. I have you, and I think it’s fabulous.