I keep reading that the audience for Talk Radio is evaporating, yet the sur sur doesn’t go away. Why ?
Sponsored radio, that is the answer. Mike Hood of Blatherwatch explains Talkee-nomics. (excerpted)
Freedom Works, is working hard against front-runner Mitt Romney… and guess what? so is Glenn Beck, who got around $1.4 million from the well-financed Republican phony grassroots “tea-party” front guided by Dick Armey.
Mark Levin’s endorsement deal with the tea party organizing group Americans for Prosperity started last summer. “Americans for Prosperity is a magnificent organization that people join voluntarily. You. Me,” Levin said on his syndicated radio show.
The Heritage Foundation, the grand-daddy conservative bullshit delivery system started this in 2008 by buying Laura Ingraham. They dropped her and now gives Rush Limbaugh $2 million and Hannity $1.3 a year to plug membership drives, and to defend the well-financed foundation when it’s feeling persecuted (which is most of the time).
(Beck and many other conservative talkers have long been integrating their sponsors’ messages into their “entertainment” with their 1-2 punch selling gold at incredibly inflated prices. First he predicts a dog-eat-dog Mad Max world after a collapse of the US financial system, (coming any dy, now) then pitches Goldline products as a hedge strategy. Dittoheads are some of the most gullible people in the world, loyal to a fault and willing to believe anything these on-air hucksters sell, whether it’s their loopy politics or gold retailed at prices as much as 5-10X the cost on the real market).
It’s working and working real good.
Heritage estimates that it in each of the past two years, its sponsorships with Limbaugh and Hannity brought in more than 40,000 new memberships starting at the $25 level, while FreedomWorks said that in the three months after its Beck sponsorship started in April 2010, the group saw a huge spike in traffic to its website (which featured a photo of Beck linked to a fundraising appeal), resulting in 50,000 new email sign-ups.
There’s nothing illegal about this, unfortunately, although old broadcast ethics have been flushed ignominiously down the golden executive toilets of these values-thumping whores.
“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts,” said the leader of one [conservative] group who inquired about ads on various radio shows, but decided they were both too expensive and ethically suspect. “If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.”