The free market speaks against Limbaugh
by David Atkins
Cumulus media empire CEO Lew Dickey has been pulling out the long knife for Rush Limbaugh:
On the conference call Tuesday, when asked specifically about the network business and the impact of the talk segment, CEO Lew Dickey made a passing mention without naming names. “We’ve had a tough go of it this last year. The facts are indisputable over the last year.” In recent days, the Rush Limbaugh camp made it clear they were not happy with Dickey blaming any revenue shortfall on Rush. People close to Cumulus tell Radio Ink, “48 of the top 50 network advertisers have “exclude Rush and Hannity” orders. Every major national ad agency has same dictate.”
This didn’t just happen on its own. It was the product of the dedicated activists at StopRush and Flush Rush who have pounded advertisers over their contributions to Limbaugh’s hate speech. Limbaugh and radio station owners are now going after each other, as Limbaugh’s bosses claim he’s losing them revenue and Limbaugh himself says his bosses aren’t doing a good enough job of selling his product.
So the free market worked, right? Limbaugh became popular because of market forces, and now market forces are dragging him down. It’s even, right?
Hardly. One reason right-wing radio became such an overwhelming format on the AM dial isn’t just pure market forces: it’s also a product of ideological companies like Clear Channel driving other voices off the air for their own reasons. The power of citizen activists pales in comparison to the power of monopolistic capital. But second, the entire free market approach to problem solving relies on delayed response. Companies are supposed to operate free of regulation. Then when they do bad things, consumers are supposed to notice, take action, and cause financial problems for the perpetrators by harming their sales. Of course, that requires that consumers realize they’ve been wronged, discover which entity wronged them, organize well enough to fight back against that entity, and then have enough power in the marketplace to force changes. None of those are a given.
But beyond that, the biggest problem is the delay. How much damage will the company in the free market do before their transgressions are punished? How many people will be hurt while society waits for the market to do its work?
Sure, the market and citizen activism may be punishing Limbaugh far, far too late. Calling graduate students fighting for reproductive rights “sluts” may have been the last straw, but it wasn’t the worst of his offenses. How much damage has Limbaugh in his perch atop the monopolized AM radio world? How many decades has his brand of hate speech and all the little Limbaugh clones who have come in his wake contributed to damaging public policy and the coarsening of our political rhetoric?
Wouldn’t it have been better to have more effective regulation of the media companies who dominate the airwaves before the damage was done?
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