“He would always say people listen to the radio for three things: ‘entertainment, entertainment, entertainment.’ He'd say that his goal was to charge ‘confiscatory advertising rates,” says Rosenwald.
Barney Frank of Massachusetts with the song “My Boy Lollipop.” To ridicule animal rights activists he introduced wildlife segments with Andy Williams’ “Born Free,” overdubbed with mortar blasts, shotguns firing and animals squawking. He preceded segments about the openly gay Rep. He “aborted” progressive callers by drowning them out to the sound of a vacuum cleaner. He would employ a DJ’s hijinks to keep the audience tuned in-lampooning liberals in a way that thrilled his audience. Limbaugh caught fire with an audience that felt alienated and unheard-white men and conservative white women who saw the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a threat to traditional hierarchies and values. Listeners had gravitated to FM for music, leaving AM radio in search of a winning programming format. At the time, AM radio was facing an existential crisis. McLaughlin, who credited Limbaugh with rescuing AM radio from oblivion in a 1994 Forbes profile, recruited the local host to New York, He debuted a two-hour talk show on WABC in August 1988 that they soon began syndicating across the country. He gets that this guy can reach through the radio and grab you and keep you listening.” “The first time he hears Limbaugh, he hates him,” Rosenwald says. When a radio consultant told his friend Ed McLaughlin about Limbaugh’s popularity there, the ABC Radio Networks President traveled to Sacramento to hear him firsthand. He tells the audience if you play this particular Slim Whitman record backwards, you'll hear the voice of the devil-and they actually sit there and overdub like a record so that you hear this voice.” Limbaugh also provoked, with lines like, “Feminism was established so that unattractive ugly broads could have easy access to the mainstream.” And he becomes a major hit,” says Rosenwald. “It's the first time anyone's ever really supported him in his career. 1 in the market, doubling the size of his audience in just a year. At the recommendation of a radio consultant, Limbaugh landed in Sacramento, filling the slot occupied by Morton Downey Jr., who’d been fired in 1984 for making a racist joke about a city councilman. The DJ’s antics proved too much for Kansas City-the last straw may well have been his decision to ridicule the Royals’ management at the same time the station was trying to strike a broadcasting deal with the baseball team.
It was such a successful formula others would later emulate it, including those on the political left, including The Daily Show’s Craig Kilborn and Jon Stewart. University of Pennsylvania fellow Brian Rosenwald, author of Talk Radio’s America, said Limbaugh would bring the outrageous DJ shtick to commentary, treating politics as a form of entertainment. The future icon was enthralled by DJ stunts that would occasionally go too far-like ordering 500 pizzas and claiming to be from the competitor’s station. He quit that job after five years and returned to the broadcasting booth. At one point he pronounced he’d give up the mike forever, and took a job with the Kansas City Royals baseball team.
"I was totally consumed," he said in one 1990 interview, noting he’d drop by the station before and after school.ĭisdainful of school-he once referred to it as “prison”-Limbaugh dropped out of college after a year and tried to break into radio, landing and losing jobs as he tried out different broadcast styles. He landed a part-time job at the local station near his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he worked as a helper before eventually graduating to disc jockey. Limbaugh was drawn to radio at an early age. He was a prolific writer, penning a number of history books for young readers, and two New York Times best sellers, The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So. The Rush Limbaugh Show could be heard on more than 650 radio stations across the Premier Radio Networks, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia, regularly attracting 15 million listeners.
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