Now we know why RushBo apologized, he’s hemorrhaging advertisers and some of them are not buying his notpology from Friday. Here’s the CEO of one his largest, Carbonite:
(FB) — “No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”
Better late than never. But it’s always a little tragic when someone suddenly discovers the entire modern right-wing edifice is built on a house of cards cemented with cruelty to the defenseless, the poor, and the sick.
The question that comes to mind is, WTF were you doing advertising on his show in the first place?
Trebuchet – The issue this time is that the insult is uncomfortably close to home for the bigwigs this time. It’s fine when Rush is lambasting those evil liberals, but to insult (in the extreme) a woman for standing up to principals hits hard those at the top that can imagine their own daughters being put in this light.
I find this to be a common thread with the C-level executives I’ve dealt with. They are very kind and concerned about their neighbors, their peers, and the people that immediately report to them. But they have a huge blind spot for the masses that work for them, truly seeing them as nothing but resources, not fellow human beings.
@1 trebuchet
Two words. Arbitron ratings
Sponsors don’t care what he says as long as people hear the advertisements……most of the time. They couldn’t care less about him. They want his audience.
Of course, sometimes a shock jock will step knee deep into something so foul that sponsors run away screaming from the smell of it. It looks like this is one of those times.
The coffin nail on Limbaugh’s career will meet the hammer when a large enough audience makes it known that they don’t like what they’re hearing.
Have you written/emailed the companies that bought ad space yet?
Several years ago, our family-run business advertised on local radio. In our market, the most popular station was a talk-radio format, with a high ( but not exclusive) proportion of right- wing programs. Rush, Glenn Beck, etc. We would specify that our advertising would not be run on these programs, but as the programming became became less and less diverse, we couldn’t find any non-right wing programming on this station. Finally we stopped radio advertising, and put most of the money into NPR sponsorship, which turned out to be a much better buy for us. We get much better response from the NPR local audience than we ever did from talk radio.
The relevance to this story, I guess, is that advertisers, especially local ones, should be more careful with the company they keep.
When I heard about Rush´s most recent dump on human decency, I was reminded of something he uttered a while ago:
“He continued: “Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns. I mean if we want to get serious about this, if we want to face this head on, we’re gonna have to openly admit liberals should not be allowed to buy guns, nor should they be allowed to use computer keyboards or typewriters, word processors or e-mails, and they should have their speech controlled.
“If we did those three or four things, I can’t tell you what a sane, calm, civil, fun-loving society we would have. Take guns out of the possession, out of the hands of liberals. Take their typewriters and their keyboards away from ‘em. Don’t let ‘em anywhere near a gun and control their speech, and you would wipe out 90 percent of the crime, 85 to 95 percent of the hate and 100 percent of the lies from society.””
http://www.wnd.com/2011/01/252589/
and this made me smile – you would expect that so much cognitive dissonance would be enough to kill a man, wouldn´t you ?