Ethan Epstein is an associate editor at The Weekly Standard.

Earlier this year, as that unmistakable bass line of the Pretenders’ My City Was Gone faded into the background, Rush Limbaugh opened his daily three-hour broadcast with characteristic bombast. “[According to the] latest research data,” he intoned, “the audience is expanding at near geometric proportions, as people seek guidance, answers, explanations, information, and an answer to the basic question, ‘What the hell is happening out there?’"

Whether “what the hell is happening out there”—in particular, the remarkable political rise of Donald Trump—has been good or bad for the Republican Party, or the country at large, there’s no denying one thing: It’s been great for talk radio. Ratings are finally ticking up, after a moribund four years. And conservative radio gabbers are driving the political conversation in a way that they didn’t when allegedly mushy moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney were the standard-bearers of the country’s conservative party.


This has been particularly true for Limbaugh, who boasts some 600 affiliates on his self-styled “Excellence in Broadcasting [EIB] Network,” and an estimated 13 million listeners per week. The Rush Limbaugh Show is easily the most-listened to talk radio program in the country. Mainstream media outlets from the New York Times to POLITICO have taken to frequently reporting its host’s utterances as news. Limbaugh has also been credited with—or blamed for—the most startling political event of the season: Donald Trump’s rise. (It’s not that he endorsed Trump during the primaries; he just didn’t go to war with him, as fellow radio right-wingers Mark Levin and Glenn Beck did.)

And yet, there are signs that all is not well in the Limbaugh radio empire. Because even as his influence is sky high and his dominance at the top of talk radio remains unchallenged, as a business proposition, Limbaugh’s show is on shaky ground. In recent years, Limbaugh has been dropped by several of his long-time affiliates, including some very powerful ones: He’s gone from WABC in New York, WRKO in Boston and KFI in Los Angeles, for example, and has in many cases been moved onto smaller stations with much weaker signals that cover smaller areas.

Four years after Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” on air, spurring a major boycott movement, reams of advertisers still won’t touch him.

Why? Because four years after Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” on air, spurring a major boycott movement, reams of advertisers still won’t touch him. He suffers from what talk radio consultant Holland Cooke calls a “scarlet letter among national brand advertisers.” And for someone who has said that “confiscatory ad rates” are a key pillar of his business, that spells trouble. (Limbaugh ignored multiple interview requests.)

Limbaugh’s extremely lucrative eight-year contract—estimated to be worth roughly $38 million a year—is up this summer. What will happen to “America’s Anchorman,” as Limbaugh quasi-ironically refers to himself, once the contract is up, is anybody’s guess. Because as he is learning, political power does not necessarily a stellar business make.

***

As Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, the leading trade publication covering the radio industry, sees it, people (and particularly the media) tend to look at Limbaugh’s show through the wrong end of the telescope.

Forget political influence or power: Limbaugh is no politician. At a fundamental level, Harrison says, “radio is a business.” And Limbaugh, at the end of the day, is selling a product.

El Rushbo sees it that way himself. “First and foremost, I’m a businessman,” he told the biographer Zev Chafets in 2008. “My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills … that enables me to sell airtime.” Limbaugh’s agnostic treatment of the Trump phenomenon—neither condemning the New York mogul, as Levin and Beck have done, nor fully throwing in with him, as Michael Savage has—is evidence of, if nothing else, Limbaugh’s canny business sense. He evidently realizes it would be bad business strategy to alienate the large numbers of his listeners who either love or loathe The Donald.

But for all his business acumen, Limbaugh’s show has been a harder sell since 2012—even if he does still impishly refer to commercial time-outs as “obscene profit timeouts.” If you had to pinpoint a moment when Limbaugh’s business model began to turn, you’d have to look to the Sandra Fluke incident, when he referred to the Georgetown law student who spoke in front of Congress in favor of the Obamacare contraception mandate as a “slut” and a “prostitute.” It was a self-inflicted error that Limbaugh has never recovered from.

In a certain sense, Limbaugh’s remarks—while appalling—were taken rather too literally. At heart, the self-styled “Maha-Rushi” is a satirist; indeed, recurring features of his show include song parodies of varying quality and some spot-on impersonations by Limbaugh himself. (His Bill Clinton, in particular, is fabulous, all the more so when you remember that Limbaugh is largely deaf.) So, he was quite obviously making a semi-satirical point when he said, “What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.” It was a theme he would revisit in multiple broadcasts over the course of a week.

But by attacking Fluke in such grotesque terms, Limbaugh broke a cardinal rule of radio—not to mention polite society, says Darryl Parks, a radio industry veteran and former Clear Channel news-talk format chief based in Cincinnati: “Don’t beat up on a woman, and don’t beat up on a [young person].”

In one fell swoop, he had done both.

The backlash was swift and unforgiving—including from Fluke herself, who rejected Limbaugh’s multiple on-air apologies. (It didn’t help matters that Limbaugh said he was sorry for “acting like … leftists” by attacking her in such personal terms.) Politicians, including not a few Republicans, scorched Limbaugh. President Barack Obama even called Fluke to offer his support, elevating the issue to one of supreme national importance.

The Sandra Fluke incident “did a lot of harm to talk radio,” Darryl Parks says. “Thirty-eight percent of revenue disappeared overnight.”

And most consequentially, David Brock’s liberal watchdog Media Matters for America launched a $100,000 (at least) campaign calling for advertisers to refuse to buy time on Limbaugh’s show and for local affiliates to jettison it. The anti-Limbaugh faction came up with the social media-friendly slogan “Flush Rush.” The group’s efforts met considerable success in the months that followed. Dozens of companies, including Netflix, JCPenney and Sears, announced they would boycott Limbaugh’s show. Most have yet to return. And the increasing popularity of platforms like Twitter, which can be used to stoke outrage and promote boycotts, makes it highly unlikely they ever will.

The Sandra Fluke incident “did a lot of harm to talk radio,” Darryl Parks says. “Thirty-eight percent of revenue disappeared overnight.” And the damage was not limited to Limbaugh; he hurt all of talk radio, including even some liberal hosts. Certain programs—Michael Savage, for example, and in an earlier era, Bob Grant—had always been considered “toxic” by some advertisers, but after the Fluke incident, entire stations—or indeed, the entire format of talk radio—were deemed no-go zones by blue chip brands.

JCPenney PR executive Kate Coultas explains this via email. “We [now] have a general ‘no run’ policy in place to not advertise on any kind of political program,” Coultas writes. Prior to the Fluke incident, the venerable department store chain “sponsored the traffic and news update (‘brought to you by JCPenney’) that ran during the [Limbaugh] program time.” Now, Coultas explains, JCP has “stricter guard rails in place to ensure that our sponsorship of traffic, news, and weather reports [do] not run during political programs.” Smaller outfits took the same approach: The vice president of marketing at the Long Beach, California, Aquarium of the Pacific tells me that, after the Sandra Fluke incident, “We decided to remove all our advertising from talk radio so that there would be no implied endorsement for or against anyone’s point of view.” The aquarium has stuck by that vow ever since.

In the end, the collateral damage was significant. The Wall Street Journal Radio Network, for example, which broadcast news updates on stations across the country, could not withstand the loss of ad revenue from brands like Penney. It shuttered completely in 2014—a decision directly attributable to the Fluke fallout, says one talk radio consultant.

“Media Matters hit us for a long period of time,” recalls Marc Beaven, general manager of Baltimore-based talk station WCBM. “Some sponsors never came back.”

The story was similar for Steve Harness, general manager for KOWL of South Lake Tahoe, California, one of Limbaugh’s first local affiliates. (The Rush Limbaugh Show began its existence not far from Tahoe, in Sacramento.) Harness tells me he received “FedEx packages full of petitions saying to drop Rush” after the Fluke comments. And advertisers fled, as well. “I had a hard time getting anyone to advertise,” he says, “even if they were conservative.”

Even when they could sell ads, radio stations found that they had to move them at fire-sale prices. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2015 that talk radio ad revenue was falling and that “advertising on talk stations now costs about half what it does on music stations, given comparable audience metrics.” The Journal attributed this directly to the Media Matters campaign after the Fluke incident, with one radio executive saying that it “was enough to change the paradigm for all of talk radio.” The falling ad rates are particularly troubling, given that talk radio listeners tend to be more educated and affluent than the average American; under normal circumstances, advertisers would pay a premium to reach them.

Even though the Sandra Fluke incident is now four years in the rearview mirror, Media Matters and others have kept up the pressure—they continue to urge stations and advertisers to “Flush Rush.” “The boycott has endured,” laments one radio consultant with direct knowledge of the situation facing talk stations.

Some clever Limbaugh affiliates have found a way to get around this: Holland Cooke, the talk radio consultant, tells me that some of his “Limbaugh-affiliated client stations actually geo-fence their online stream [meaning that only people in the local area can listen online], to spare their advertisers harassment from distant boycott movement apparatchiks.” That notwithstanding, the biggest brands still stay away from Limbaugh. In 2015, the top five national radio advertisers were T-Mobile, Comcast, Home Depot, GEICO and Sprint. But you won’t hear ads from those giants on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Instead, most of Limbaugh’s spots are so-called “direct-response ads” (“enter the promo code Rush”) from the likes of home security companies, gold and silver purveyors and flower delivery outfits.

Making matters worse for affiliates has been the unusual business model of Limbaugh’s show.

iHeart Media (née Clear Channel) produces and distributes the program through its subsidiary syndicator Premiere Networks. And local affiliates pay Premiere dearly for the right to carry the show. They have to pony up an annual “carriage fee,” as well as barter commercial time—about five minutes each hour in which the local affiliate has to air ads that Limbaugh’s national syndicator has sold.

In some cities, it’s a vertically integrated business model. iHeart Media also happens to be in the business of owning radio stations, so in cities where other options can’t be found, Limbaugh’s show is broadcast on stations that its syndicator’s parent company happens to own. (In this scenario, the stations still pay fees, but the money is essentially shuffled from one part of the iHeart Media to to another.)

In many cities, however, local stations or stations owned by direct iHeart Media competitors are the ones paying the large carriage fees.

Limbaugh’s business model breaks down if these local affiliates can’t sell a lot of expensive ads to recoup the fee: In that case, the stations end up losing money on his show. That helps to explain why, over the past several years, Limbaugh has been dropped by some his biggest long-time affiliates.

In 2013, he announced his departure from New York’s powerhouse WABC, his long-time flagship station, which is owned by Cumulus, an iHeart Media competitor. Indeed, although Limbaugh has for more than a decade broadcast out of his “Southern Command” in Palm Beach, he for years worked out of WABC’s studios in Manhattan.

WABC said at the time that it was making a strategic decision to focus on local programming, but Darryl Parks says the situation was more complicated.

“Cumulus wanted Limbaugh’s [carriage fee] eliminated or reduced,” Parks says. “The real possibility was WABC would cancel the show. So, iHeart Media bought WOR [a different station with similar ratings], to insure clearance in the nation's No. 1 market. Not having Limbaugh cleared in NYC would be very bad for business and would send a very bad message about the show’s popularity to the public.” Once iHeart Media completed the purchase of WOR, Limbaugh moved there. Around the same time, a similar tale played out on the West Coast; Limbaugh left his long-time affiliates in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and moved to more obscure stations, higher on the dial, that iHeart Media owns.

Bigger blows followed. Last summer, 50,000-watt powerhouse WRKO, out of Boston, the 10th largest radio market in the country, dropped Limbaugh. He ended up moving to a tiny, suburban iHeart Media station in Everett, Massachusetts, a 5,000-watt signal that until then had offered Spanish-language programming. The smaller the wattage, the smaller the coverage area of the station: Limbaugh will now barely be listenable outside Cambridge, Medford, where the station’s transmitter is located, and downtown Boston.

Limbaugh’s business model breaks down if local affiliates can’t sell a lot of expensive ads to recoup the carriage fee: In that case, the stations end up losing money on his show.

In Indianapolis, he suffered a similar indignity, canned by the 50,000-watt station that had carried his show for some 22 years. There too, he was moved to an iHeart Media-owned station, with a fraction of the wattage of his former home. In March there were rumors that WLS, Limbaugh’s long-time station in Chicago, would drop him by the end of the month, but they haven’t materialized.

Tahoe’s Steve Harness himself dropped Limbaugh from KOWL last summer, and he blames the carriage fees for his decision. “I was losing advertisers, and had to write a check every month,” he says, incredulous. Harness says he tried to get Premiere to drop Limbaugh’s fee, but to no avail. If the syndicator let Harness off the hook for the fee, there would be a “snowball effect,” they told him. (Premiere ignored multiple requests for comment on this article.)

The move to smaller stations in big markets has apparently hammered Limbaugh’s syndicator. In the old days, Premiere Networks “could make a lot of money through fees—a million [dollars] a year or more from single stations,” says John Mainelli, a long-time radio executive who was WABC’s program director when Limbaugh made the move from Sacramento to New York. Limbaugh’s old affiliate in Boston, for example, paid some $500,000 a year to carry his show, estimates Darryl Parks; when you add in all of the commercial time they had to surrender to Limbaugh, the total value came in closer to $1.2 million, Parks says.

Now, because Limbaugh has been moved to so many smaller stations that pay much smaller fees, Premiere is “not collecting anywhere near what they used to collect in fees,” says Mainelli. And Mainelli points out that with the decline in ad revenue since 2012, the fees have become even more important: Their reduction has only added insult to Premere’s injury.

On top of that, it stands to reason that if Limbaugh is moved to enough lower-watt stations, his ratings will eventually suffer. (Parks says that is likely, but that Premiere probably won’t ever admit it. And since Nielsen doesn't supply ratings for national shows like Limbaugh’s, it would be hard to find out.)

To be sure, even if Limbaugh had not attacked Fluke, there would have been some slippage in his business model as talk radio’s audience aged and new media continued to grow. “Rush remains a major player; times are different,” says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers. To a certain extent, Limbaugh’s “woes are about radio, not him,” says Harrison.

Those woes are familiar to anyone who works in print media, television or the movies: The Internet has brought a wave of competition for attention, ensuring that nobody, with a few rare exceptions, dominates anything anymore. Radio is also saddled with an aging audience; at many talk stations, the average listener is in his early 60s, outside the key demographic (generally, 18-to-54) that advertisers prize.

In this sense, the fact that Limbaugh still draws some 13 million listeners a week (though that’s down from his 1990s peak of more than 20 million) is impressive—and so is his singular influence. A cursory search on LexisNexis shows that Limbaugh was mentioned 440 times in English-language news sources from March 28 to April 28, 2016. Over the same period, Mark Levin garnered 160 mentions; Michael Savage, 94. When Limbaugh has a few times attacked the magazine I work for, we’ve known it: Our email accounts have filled up with missives from angry dittoheads.

In a way, though, this is a clear demonstration of how much the Fluke foul-up affected Limbaugh’s business: Given how popular and influential he still is, you’d expect stations to be lining up to carry his show, and advertisers lining up to buy time. Simply put: It didn’t have to be this way.

***

None of his show’s woes have hurt Limbaugh personally, of course. He has a guaranteed contract dating back to 2008 that runs into July. But with his deal coming to an end in a few months, it’s an open question what the future will hold for the “Doctor of Democracy.”

Most of the people I spoke with for this story speculate that Limbaugh will probably stay with Premiere. “My gut says [Premiere] will do anything they can to sign him again,” says one consultant. “Premier wants him,” agrees Tom Taylor, who runs the NOW radio newsletter. “At the right price.”

And given all that’s transpired over the past several years, the big question is what that “right price” will be. It almost certainly won’t be as nice as his current arrangement, a contract so lucrative it allowed Limbaugh to buy a Gulfstream G550 he dubbed “EIB 1.”

Premiere will probably try to “cut his paycheck in half, or by 60 percent. ... There’s just no way they can pay him the same amount.”

“Rush still makes money for Premiere,” said Taylor’s NOW radio newsletter in 2015, “But it’s probably not as much as he made in 2008.” Should he renew, Limbaugh can expect a “big haircut,” says John Mainelli. Premiere will probably try to “cut his paycheck in half, or by 60 percent,” he says. “There’s just no way they can pay him the same amount.”

Compounding the problem is that Premiere’s parent company, iHeart Media, is facing severe financial difficulties and could soon declare bankruptcy. Premiere is in no position for profligacy. And should Limbaugh remain at his current home, you can expect more affiliate attrition. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of deals made with stations as far as [reducing] the fees,” says a consultant who asked to remain anonymous. “Yes, they will probably lose a few [altogether], including a big station or two.”

A big question is whether Limbaugh would be willing to countenance a significant pay cut, particularly were it to become public. Like Donald Trump, a big part of Limbaugh’s brand is “winning,” after all. Therefore, it’s easy to envisage him pursuing other options: He could start an Internet channel, as Glenn Beck has done with The Blaze. It would already have a built-in subscriber base: Premiere offers a $49.95 a year “Rush 24/7” membership program that gives subscribers access to podcasts, show archives and sundry other benefits. Limbaugh’s fan base is not as “broad as it used to be,” Tom Taylor tells me, “but it’s just as deep,” and they’d certainly follow him to the Internet.

Or, he could go the route of his new Palm Beach neighbor Howard Stern, and move to the satellite radio provider SiriusXM. Like Stern, Limbaugh would presumably benefit from operating in a format where advertising is less important. And also like Stern, Limbaugh has a dedicated core group of fans who would follow him into the brave new world of radio that you actually have to pay for. “Satellite would be very interested in him,” avers Michael Harrison of Talkers.

But moving to the Internet or satellite radio would also, as it has for Stern, reduce Limbaugh’s mass exposure. You could expect fewer New York Times or POLITICO stories about what Limbaugh happened to say about Trump on any given day. And there’s the fact that Limbaugh has himself disavowed any interest in moving to SiriusXM. In 2013, he told a group of affiliate station owners and program directors that he would never “betray” them in that way. Of course, that was also before many afilliates had abandoned him.

One thing’s for sure, says just about everyone I talked to: Even though he’s officially reached retirement age, Limbaugh will do some form of audio programming in the years to come. His love for what he does is obvious: On air, Limbaugh often says he’s “having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.” And he sounds like he means it.

Indeed, his infectious enthusiasm is one quality that explains something important that Limbaugh’s detractors miss: He’s really good at what he does. He takes very few callers, and conducts almost no interviews. For three hours, he just talks. And he’s funny, unpredictable, stimulating. No easy feat.

But Limbaugh’s raw talent and sheer joie de vivre won’t be enough to save his current business model in an environment where his advertisers and affiliates have increasingly headed for the doors. In that sense, “Flush Rush” appears to be the rare boycott that actually worked.

Should Limbaugh leave terrestrial radio, it will be difficult to find a substitute. “Is there a voice that can replace him?” asks Baltimore’s Beaven. “That’s hard.”

For KOWL’s Steve Harness, however, it didn’t turn out to be that hard at all: He replaced Limbaugh with Dennis Prager, the cerebral conservative talker who broadcasts out of Southern California. Harness tells me he hasn’t had any problems since he picked up Prager: “I don’t have that issue with Dennis Prager calling people sluts.”