Penis scientist Rush Limbaugh is reportedly upset with executives at his flagship station WABC and its parent company, Cumulus. He’s so mad, in fact, that’s he’s reportedly threatening to leave the company. Why? Because Lew Dickey, Cumulus’s CEO, is (probably correctly) blaming Limbaugh’s “slut†comments last year for declining ad revenue at the company
Several major advertisers dropped support for Limbaugh after the “slut†incident, but Limbaugh and a source who spoke with the Daily News said the show’s earnings were “very minimally impacted in the short term.â€
Politico, however, notes that Dicky, on an August 2012 earnings call, said Cumulus’s top three stations lost $5.5 million. Some of those losses, Dickey said, were because of the boycotts agains Limbaugh. In a March 2013 earnings call, Dickey said the company was still suffering because of the comments, blaming them for roughly a third of the company’s revenue losses.
“There has been residual hangover … in terms of advertisers sitting out,†Dickey said in March. “Clearly that’s had an impact. … That’s something that we are dealing with on an ongoing basis.â€
But a source told the New York Daily News, “Lew needs someone to blame, (so) he’s pointing fingers instead of fixing his own sales problem.”
Another source spoke to the Politico:
“It’s a very serious discussion, because Dickey keeps blaming Rush for his own revenue problems,” the source close to the show told POLITICO. “Dickey’s talk stations underperform talk stations owned by other operators in generating revenue by a substantial margin. It’s not a single show issue… it’s a failure of the entire station. And trying to blame Rush for that is not much of a business partnership.”
So, would the top-rated radio host in the country actually leave the stations that broadcast him in his largest markets? Maybe. Less Rush would certainly be a good thing, though that seems very unlikely to happen.
Regardless, this will make for a boring section in John Cusack’s movie about Limbaugh.
[Image via AP]
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via Gawker http://gawker.com/rush-limbaugh-threatens-to-leave-network-over-blame-for-493007045