IS FATS LIMBAUGH'S INFLUENCE OVERBLOWN?

(h/t The Dish)

There are at least 3 questions in that title: (1) how large is Fats audience?;(2) how many of those listeners are true believers?; (3) how influential are those listeners?

A Media Matters investigative article had this interesting calculation:

As a radio trade reporter confirmed to MSNBC last week, common industry shorthand to determine the actual size of a radio audience at any given moment is to cut the cume figure down by a factor of 10, which would mean Limbaugh's 20 million becomes 2 million. Or, if you take the more modest cume number of 14 million, which some inside the industry have used to judge the talker's audience, Limbaugh's rating becomes 1.4 million, which is roughly the same size audience that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann get each night on cable TV.

Talkers Magazine currently has Fats at 15 million, so the real number today would be about 1.5 million. That's respectable but a long way from the 20 million Fats has been claiming since 1993.

We know that Fats is disliked by many people, so perhaps Michael Harrison of Talkers Magazine is correct:

"The people who love him are a very small segment of the public," said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, ...

Finally, how influential are these listeners? Matthew Dowd makes the case that they don't have that much clout:

This idea that he influences a large number of Republican voters is a complete myth. Keep in mind, Rush Limbaugh attacked Newt Gingrich before the South Carolina primary, and Newt Gingrich won South Carolina.

And then Rush Limbaugh attacked Mitt Romney before the Florida primary, and Mitt Romney wins Florida.