The Eddie Principle
We've encountered North Dakota's Fast Eddie Schultz before. He's the former conservative talk show host who turned liberal a few years back, to great acclaim and personal gain.
Did I say acclaim? In February of 2004 - six weeks before FrankennetAir America went on the air - Schultz' show was featured on the Today Show as "The left's next answer to Rush Limbaugh". He had, on that day, about six stations, mostly in tiny markets.
It's been uphill for Schultz since then - he airs in about 100 markets, including some large ones. As I've noted before, he's not generally as bad as Air America; he's actually paid some radio dues and learned how talk radio is done.
Still, as Brian Maloney shows, Fast Eddie and his people can play just as fast and loose with facts as his larger, more-capitalized counterparts.
Maloney quotes an LATimes puffpiece on Fast Eddie:
Still the competitor he was on the football field, Schultz's ready smile tightens when he talks about winning his time slot in major markets and proving the naysayers wrong. He would like the world to know that, according to the latest industry ratings, he is beating Sean Hannity head to head in San Diego, Denver, Seattle and Miami — and doing so with a tiny staff and a budget of less than $1 million a year. His national audience is approaching 2 million. (In Los Angeles, after a year on KTLK, his number of listeners has doubled and is estimated at just under 100,000.)
Unmentioned, as Maloney notes: KTLK's ratings
"doubled" from a near-vanishing .3 to a merely untenable .8.
Schultz has watched ruefully as Christian broadcasting companies have bought stations in Phoenix, Missoula, Mont., and Charleston, S.C., where he was on the air and sent him packing. Protesting Mormons drove him off a station in Salt Lake City after only three weeks.
That's just too much.
Maloney retorts:
Regarding Christians working to knock off Schultz and liberal radio, that's a kooky conspiracy theory. It should have been edited out of the story.
Christian networks are buying up stations all over the place; it's a booming business. In many cases, they're the same kind of low-power, frequently unrated AM stations that also carry programs like Air America and Schultz (1330AM in the Twin Cities, Janet Robert's original frequency, was a good example, being bought by a Catholic network even before AA aired, meaning AA and Schultz had to change frequencies twice before settling, for now, at 950). Christian radio audiences - sort of like AM1280's audience - tend to have the sort of demographics and listening habits that can make an otherwise-marginal AM station into a fairly profitable investment.
Read the entire Maloney piece.
Posted by Mitch at
April 3, 2006 06:40 AM
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Demographsics that...
Can be made up wholecoth by the blog author.
E.G. Average income of six figures, well, if you mean FAMILY income, not average listener, then the AVERAGE was just about 90k, on a weighted average balance. But then again, that was based upon a non-scientific poll of listeners, and without a greater amount of scrutiny, appears to show that the average listener at 1280 is pretty much, average, outside of the hours a day they spend listening (which is pretty accurate, but sad).
Mitchlight
Posted by: mitchless at April 3, 2006 09:41 AMPB...er, "Mitchless" - wrote:
"E.G. Average income of six figures, well, if you mean FAMILY income, not average listener, then the AVERAGE was just about 90k, on a weighted average balance."
Actually, that is pretty close to correct.
MERELY double the regional average income.
" But then again, that was based upon a non-scientific poll of listeners, and without a greater amount of scrutiny"
..except, of course, by advertisers, for whom such things are pretty important.
"appears to show that the average listener at 1280 is pretty much, average, outside of the hours a day they spend listening"
Which is huge to advertisers.
" (which is pretty accurate, but sad)."
About as sad as someone who's been blocked from a blog for repeatedly posting off-topic comments and bogging the blog down in endless, spittle-flecked rage, thinking up an anonymous handle and going to a different IP address.
THAT kind of sad.
Again - the info I got, I got from reliable sources (in the business, actually). I have never "Made anything up from whole cloth" on this blog, ever.
Posted by: mitch at April 3, 2006 09:48 AMMitchless/PB longs for whole cloth so he can continue tearing at his clothes. Pretty sad, indeed.
BTW, did Eddie ever grow a spine and debate Dennis Prager?
Posted by: Nancy at April 3, 2006 10:13 AMhttp://www.fraterslibertas.com/2005_10_01_archive.html#112898142353983829
Sorry, P. Never read your email. I figured, what was the point? Perhaps I'll go back and exhume it.
Everything you said in the two (now-deleted) comments was absolute bullshit.
Posted by: mitch at April 3, 2006 10:26 AMYep, I remember MPR having to "save" WCAL from those nasty Christian networks to preserve classical music for the Twin Cities. Or was it to perserve Bill Kling's bonus, since classical music is now preserved in one convenient - and competitorless - location?
Posted by: Night Writer at April 3, 2006 01:40 PM