Now, before I give you the results of the chart, let me read to you the accompanying paragraph that is published just to the left entitled, “Where Hard News Consumers Go — Most news organizations attract a wide range of news consumers, including the hard-news core and those who are less interested in such news, but some stand out for their high proportion of hard-news viewers and readers. Among the regular audiences for broadcast programs, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, 56% attentive, the Sunday morning interview programs, 52%, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 52%, and Larry King Live, 48%, have especially large numbers of hard-news consumers.”
So at the top of the list: Rush Limbaugh’s radio show 56%, as the most often cited source where consumers of hard news go. Here is the list in descending order. This show is at the top of the list, and this is the first I’ve heard about this. They did not publicize this. “Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, 56%. Sunday morning news shows, 52%. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, 52%. O’Reilly’s show, 49%. Larry King Live, 48%, PMSNBC, C-SPAN, 45%. ABC World News Tonight, 44%. Fox News, 43. TV news magazines, 42. CNN, 42. NBC Nightly News, 42. CBS Evening News, 41. The morning news shows, 40. NPR, 40. ESPN, 35. The Daily Show, 23,” and that’s what the libs think is shaping public opinion in this country is The Daily Show.
So when you boil all this down, what it adds up to is that the largest percentage of consumers of hard news listen to this radio program more so than they do the nightly news programs, and our audience is larger on a daily basis than theirs are. The Sunday morning news shows, and this is the first we’ve heard of it. You know what? I’m going to scan this. We need to scan this and send it up there to Koko.
Do you have the whole report? You do. It’s a pdf file. Get the pdf file for Koko, and I just read page 28 here, plus the cover pages. I’m sure there’s a lot of other data in here, but I just don’t remember this being reported at all. Hubba hubba. It doesn’t surprise me. It explains a whole lot of things. I’ll tell you what, it was after the Democrats… but it was a little bit later than this survey.
It was in November of 2004 when the Democrats had again failed or was it ’02 after the Wellstone memorial? Which was it, ’02 or ’04? Whenever it was one of those two years, and the Democrats had failed to take back the House, take back the Senate, and they were stunned because, like now, they thought then that it was automatic — and the Puffster, who was the Senate majority leader at the time, Tom Daschle, said, “Our focus groups have…” and I forget his exact quote. “Our focus groups research indicates that Rush Limbaugh has more people than just conservatives listening. He’s not just preaching to the choir,” and they were shocked and they were stunned because they’ve all assumed all this time that the only people who listen to this program are conservative, mind-numbed robots, and they were blown away.
That’s when their plans to coalesce behind their own silly little inconsequential liberal radio network started effervescing, if you will, bubbling up. Well, this explains a lot. It does. It explains why this program is so maligned and impugned because they are jealous. They are just beside themselves, and they can’t believe it, and they can’t get away with it anymore. They can’t. Well, no, they think they can. They think they’ve actually shaped public opinion on the war and so forth. But that’s why I said yesterday, “They think they shape public opinion on the war, but we had all these protests on Sunday and nobody went out there.” I mean, piddly little numbers, embarrassing little numbers here for the anti-war crowd.
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