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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, even my own staff challenges me. When I issue edicts, commands, orders, ideas, you would think that there would be overwhelming blanket acquiescence, approval, and support.

When I, a year ago, issued this ban, if you will, of MSNBC sound bites — I’m not playing them anymore; I’m not gonna air any MSNBC bites — I got little snarky notes from members of the staff telling me, “Boy, it was really great what was on MSNBC last night, but we can’t use it.” Well, let me tell you what’s happened as a result of that ban. I maintain that it was this program propping up whatever audience they had.

Because in the year that we have banned MSNBC, their audience has declined by over half. They barely have an audience. They’re down… I don’t know what the real numbers are. I’ve got ’em here somewhere. But they’re barely above being noted in Nielsen. They have continued to slide every rating period since we instituted the ban. They have lost audience, and the full-year tab is in, and they are down huge. It’s inside baseball media is talking about it.

Now, they’re not (of course) associating it with being banned here. (interruption) Oh, they’re much lower than CNN! I mean, you can’t see ’em. I’m telling you, they’re bottom of the barrel, and the bottom is almost out of the barrel. You need a microscope. I mean, they are plummeting rapidly, and there’s no end in sight, and it coincides with my instituting a ban of all MSNBC sound bites on this program.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The details on MSNBC are from NewsBusters. “[N]ew numbers show that some of the network’s programs lost up to almost half of their viewers since last August. The numbers just released by Nielsen and reported by TVNewser show MSNBC averaging 520,000 total viewers during primetime this month,” total viewers, “and 173,000 in the all important demographic of people aged 25 to 54.”

May I put that in perspective for you?

Their total audience equals the New York audience at any given 15 minutes for this program. For a network that claims to be a national network of any kind, to have half a million people nationwide is embarrassing, and that’s down 50%. Then you get the demo 173,000. I’ll tell you what’s interesting about this. CNN is down, the networks are down, while conservative books sell through the wazoo and end up number one on the New York Times list.

The most listened to radio talk shows are conservative. The most watched cable news network is conservative. So the obvious question is: How do elections happen the way they do? We own books; we own talk radio; we own cable news. Well, the answer is, “We’re nowhere in the pop culture. We are nowhere in movies. We’re nowhere in television shows. We are nowhere in music. Nowhere!”

On the fiction side of books, we’re nowhere, in terms of what conservatism is, being cool and plot lines and that kind of thing. We’re not in the classroom, we’re not in academia, we’re not the professors and the presidents of universities. We are not school superintendents. Those are very crucial because they get people when they’re young, young skulls full of mush. They get to make and form those brains and basically propagandize them and indoctrinate them however they wish.

You go program by program here. Here’s the bottom line: “[S]ince August 2012, MSNBC lost 28% of total viewers and 32% in the [25-54] demo in total day and 36% and 32% respectively in primetime. But here’s the really bad news! The Rachel Maddow Show…” She’s supposedly the heroine of that network. Rachel Maddow, that’s the show, the defining show. That show is the face of MSNBC. She just recorded “all-time low ratings in total and demo viewers. She was down 43% and 47% respectively.”

A program called The Last Word — what is that? I think that’s the Larry O’Donnell show. He “also hit a low in total viewers losing 40% of that audience and 42% in the demo.” This new guy that they’ve got in there… You know, I better stop. I’m gonna rein myself in. They got a new guy in there that just… I don’t know. Well, this new guy is down 50%, this new guy who took over The Ed Show with Sergeant Schultz.

Sergeant Schultz has been on weekends for a while, but they’re bringing Sergeant Schultz back because the new guy is making such a mess of things. So it cannot be and is not a coincidence that the bottom has dropped out of MSNBC, coinciding with the decision made by me to stop airing any sound bites from MSNBC. I just thought, “Why should I elevate them? It’s nothing but fruitcake nuttiness.” It’s really irrational insanity (if that’s even possible) and the entertainment value of it long ceased to be there.

It’s so insane, it’s like laughing at people that can’t help themselves.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Jim in Bergen County, New Jersey. Hi, Jim. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you, sir. How are you?

RUSH: Very well.

CALLER: That’s great. Rush, I want to go back to what you were saying when the program began, and that was, you know, how all these different news organizations — Rachel Maddow, that guy that O’Brien guy and all this — you know, their audiences are shrinking. The New York Times is in financial trouble. All these liberal media, I mean, it’s like they’re talking themselves out of a job, and I’d like to get your take on it. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense.

RUSH: But they’re not. Now, there are liberals losing jobs in journalism, and they are at the small- and middle-market newspapers, and it’s starting to happen at the big newspapers.

CALLER: Right, right.

RUSH: The New York Times buyouts, Washington Post, LA Times and so forth. But, for the most part, they’re still in business out there, aren’t they?

CALLER: Yeah, but —

RUSH: CNN’s still in business with nobody watching. MSNBC? Every time they lose audience, they get even further to the left! It’s like they punish the audience. It’s like Democrats when they lose elections: They rip the audience or the voters to shreds. I don’t know how to explain this. They don’t think they’re talking themselves out of a job. They think they’re holding onto their jobs. The cause is everything!

The people that worked at CNN and the management at CNN were almost given awards for great heroism as their network was losing audience and money, because they hung in there. “They hung in there with liberalism! They didn’t compromise. They didn’t give the audience what it wanted. They continued to promote the cause no matter the professional pain,” and that’s what’s happening to people at MSNBC. They’re sitting there in denial and anger at their audience for being too stupid to figure it out.

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