MORE ON THE FIGHT AGAINST LIMBAUGH

Tom Taylor writes that we've had a big effect on talk radio:

Talk radio, two years after Rush and Sandra Fluke.

Rush Limbaugh made Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke famous in February 2012, setting the stage for her to become nationally known – and now for her to file with the Democratic party as a potential candidate to succeed California Rep. Henry Waxman. (That’s per the Washington Post.) What a difference two years has made in Fluke’s life, and in talk radio. What began as an alert by liberal monitoring group Media Matters about Rush’s birth-control comments has morphed into an ongoing social media campaign. The result has been a turnover in some – not all – of the traditional advertisers on Rush’s show, and other talk shows too. As this NOW Newsletter has reported since we launched in November 2012, the discomfort level toward talk radio by some advertisers has not only persisted, it’s even spread to all-news radio. That doesn’t make any sense, but some ad-buyers just want to avoid any potential pain and protest. There've always been “do not buy” dictates from advertisers who don’t want their ads placed around controversial content. What the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke episode taught us was just how much that attitude could be shaped from the outside.