Wilmington Talk Ratings Still At Bottom

Mother of mercy, is this the end of Fatso?

Wilmington's spring book is out. The two talk stations, WILM and WDEL, are at the bottom - down from second and third from the bottom. The share for each station stays close to half what it was only three surveys back. The two talkers continue to be beaten by downstate rim shot FMs.

WSTW and WJBR remain strong. WXCY country sees a jump. Urban WJKS is up from the cellar, beating both talkers.

Since numbers for Philly stations in Wilmington are no longer published, we can't see who most people listen to.

But clearly talk is dying in Delaware, as in Philly and most everywhere else.

Standards should return to 1290, great ratings, great signal and nice presentation from the bird, when you referred to fatso did you mean the first lady....

All these markets in which the audience for right-wing talk has nose-dived. It seems sudden. And curious. Much of the audience (in Wilmington's case about half) for right-wing talk has disappeared. They can't have all been "raptured." It's almost like when suddenly The Wall came down and the USSR was Russia again (and all the satellite states and Soviet Republics became independent). Bam! I guess a rotten tree looks strong until it falls over.

Stations stuck with Rush and his clones way too long. Like somebody running a car with smoke coming out the exhaust, dash board lights on and funny noises until the engine seizes up and falls apart. Why fix it? It's still running? Get a new one? Nah, they don't make them like they used to.

DavidEduardo said:

My suspicion is that the non-stop loop of Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals just got too boring. It's been a year of much of the same stuff being repeated over and over, with scant little new information and the same finger pointing, Pelosi and Reed bashing and... well, you know the story.

At some point, even the die-hard knuckle-dragging contingent of the conservative spectrum gets bored... after all how high an IQ do you have to have to feel boredom? I'm sure the centrist conservatives and independents left long ago.

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Good points. And sort of what I'd expect from somebody like Dick Morris and others brought in from politics to talk politics. As you might guess, El Rushbo is not one of my "heroes," still given his experience going "town to town, up and down the dial," he should know better. It seems like he got seduced by the RNC and later the tea backers into being an unremitting drum beater, thinking he has "influence." The others just follow the leader and do what they are told.

20 years ago, people were saying Rush saved AM radio. Now, it seems like he and the copy cats are finally killing it.

You have said you have evidence to the full ratings data. What has happened to the people no longer listening to right-wing talk? Are they listening to something else (if so, what) or have they stopped listening (or cut way down)?

DavidEduardo said:

My suspicion is that the non-stop loop of Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, Veterans Hospitals just got too boring. It's been a year of much of the same stuff being repeated over and over, with scant little new information and the same finger pointing, Pelosi and Reed bashing and... well, you know the story.

At some point, even the die-hard knuckle-dragging contingent of the conservative spectrum gets bored... after all how high an IQ do you have to have to feel boredom? I'm sure the centrist conservatives and independents left long ago.

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Guess you never heard of WJAS which pulls in good ratings, but what would I expect from another left winged liberal.

FredLeonard said:

What has happened to the people no longer listening to right-wing talk? Are they listening to something else (if so, what) or have they stopped listening (or cut way down)?

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I'm sure a few are pushing up daisies. Others can't hear anyway.

DavidEduardo said:

At some point, even the die-hard knuckle-dragging contingent of the conservative spectrum gets bored... after all how high an IQ do you have to have to feel boredom? I'm sure the centrist conservatives and independents left long ago.

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You're better than this name calling.

All you need to say is that the format is stale, even to the core audience. Which it is. There's no need to engage in Fred-level antics.

David: That's disappointing information. Such studies of consumer product behavior are widely available. And if people who leave a format leave the medium, that's something to worry about. Shrugging one's shoulders and saying the format has "gone bad" (by those responsible for the state of the format) smacks of "What, me worry?"

I know. The audience we are talking about is outside the money demos, so who cares if they get bored and go away? Problem is if something like this happened with right-wing political talk, it can happen with other formats.

I'd also theorize here that part of the problem is the narrow focus of the format - or consistency, if you will. When talk stations had hosts with different viewpoints (and listeners with different viewpoints), all talk including right-wing talk was more interesting and less boring.

PS: There is some evidence that high IQ correlates with resistance to boredom.

DavidEduardo said:

I was referring to the ultra, far-right, dropping off the edge of the earth, birther, ultra conservative lunatic fringe... not mainstream conservatives and not Republicans in general.

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Problem is the former have become the mainstream of conservatives and the Republican party and the later are marginalized.

First of all, while certainly not a Rush/Hannity neo-con myself, I shall disclose I am a longtime Conservative Talk listener who is largely sympathetic toward many of these hosts' views (specifically with regard to economic matters). I found Rush in '89, and was blown away by his show at a time when no one else around these parts had even heard of him. His show was also very, very different-sounding back then.

I say this only so that readers who care know the lens from which I look at the current state of Talk. (Just like when I see analysts' use of terms like "birther" and "teabagger"-- I too know the perspective from which the writer comes.)

I rarely listen anymore for a variety of reasons. But I'll keep this germane to what's going on in Wilmington, as per Fred's original post.

There are two generally unrelated reasons I believe Talk is crashing especially hard in markets like Wilmington.

Conservative Talk exploded in popularity in the early '90s largely because its listeners felt they'd had no avenue for too long. An oasis in a desert of left-leaning broadcast news (still "mainstream" at the time) and big-city print, these shows not only entertained but informed listeners of the things they weren't hearing from the Big Three. A few years ahead of the Internet and Fox News Channel, millions suddenly had "their voice." Now, Talk Radio is to the Internet and Fox News as horse-pulled carriages are to cars and airplanes.

Meanwhile...

Areas that were large enough to have had their own identities, issues, politicians, and general news-- but sat in the shadows or outskirts of big TV markets (like Wilmington and Central Jersey) were not surprisingly fertile areas for successful news radio stations. In Wilmington, WILM was able to stick with the almost-all-news format decades after the NBC NIS from which it was born folded. Markets which ordinarily wouldn't have been able to support one heavy News (or News/Talk) station were able to sometimes handle two because there was no content competitor in television. NJ 101.5 is a prime example of this. Press took advantage-- albeit fifteen years later than did the Hawkinses at WILM-- of a similar situation (on a larger scale, of course).

And again, along came that Internet. And again, we're also seeing the slow erosion of NJ 101.5's influence as a news source. It is what it is.

Back to Wilmington, WILM and WDEL were both news-intensive stations that featured a steady diet at times of Conservative Talk. Whether or not WDEL's current lineup consists of "X" hours of Leftist hosts versus Conservative ones is inconsequential. The public perception of WDEL is that of a Talk station. And Talk Radio, deserved or otherwise, now is translated in the minds of "Boobus America" as Right-Wing chatter.

These stations, like hundreds of others, have painted themselves into a corner. And only the few on FM will have a chance of re-inventing themselves and surviving the decade.

As for the others, I predict lots of colon-cleanse and brokered religion. The "shortwaving" of the AM band will continue.

Even in Wilmington, where the one well-known personality earlier here affectionately (!) referred-to as "Fatso" once tried to make SW-style radio on AM "cool."

As I re-read the Brusstar History and the Eduardo Hypothesis, I think I infer a root cause of talk radio's decline (and possible extinction). The designated villain: Phil Boyce, late of WABC and TRN and currently with Salem Radio.

I, too, listened to Rush when he first joined WABC in a line-up that included liberal hosts like Lynn Samuels (now with SiriusXM) and Joy Behar (late of "The View" and HLN), plus sports talk, personal advice and other diverse program elements. Rush did a local show and a national show (which WABC delayed and carried on weekends). Because of this, each host had listeners who agreed and those who disagreed. Callers who agreed and who disagreed. Hosts had to disagree without being disagreeable. And most of all, they had to do good radio and be entertaining. Rush put his experience as an AM Top 40 jock to good use.

But then Boyce showed up and decided the station had to be consistent (audience flow and all that) and got rid of everything other than hard-ass right-wing talk (with the exception of half of the morning team who did a point-counterpoint schtick). He brought in hosts like Bob Grant and later Sean Hannity. And the hosts followed the pattern of insult pioneered by WILM's own Joe Pyne.

Meanwhile, Rush and other right-wing hosts were courted by the conservative establishment. They started thinking they were powerful and influential. Instead of doing good radio, they turned into strident drum-beaters. Basic cybernetics: Any system receiving only positive feedback will oscillate out of control. The more dittos they got, the more they were wined and dined by one per-centers, the more hosts moved to the right and the more they became incendiary in the tone of their comments.

Of course, "minor market" programmers and hosts like Fatso tend to imitate the big time by taking syndicated shows or copying major market shows. And the drum beating spread.

It took a few years, but (based on the Eduardo Hypothesis) eventually even the angry old White guys, who were about all that was left in their audience, got tired of the incessant drum beating.

If talk radio hadn't kept getting ideologically narrower and more heated, it might not have worn out its welcome.

And for the record, to my ears, NJ 101.5 never followed this pattern in their talk shows, through WILM did. WILM tried to position itself as a "news station" despite the fact that about half its airtime was devoted to talk (mostly conservative). (Trivia: NJ 101.5's former AM station was once an NIS affiliate, too.). But I agree that both Wilmington AM stations did keep the "news" in news/talk.

My hypothesis: Right-wing talk is the way it is and got so much airtime the way it did is because owners and managers liked it. So did many advertisers, too, until they started seeing it as controversial. They ignored or explained away the loss in cume long-standing talk stations experienced with the narrowing of the talk format because owners and managers tend to be conservative, their friends and clients tend to be conservative, too. Now they've lost advertisers and cume and the investment firms that control the major group owners can't ignore the state of talk any more.


Liberal bias in major newspapers and TV network news. Tricky Dick popularized that one, the guy who made paranoia a political strategy. Any time he looked bad, he started screaming liberal bias. Conservatives picked it up. So did some liberals (like Hillary). It's the politicians equivalent of the "race card" or "gender card." Got egg on your face? Play the bias card. The true believers will buy it every time. People see something that makes their guy look bad, they tend to remember it more than all the stuff what made him look good.

DavidEduardo said:

I was referring to the ultra, far-right, dropping off the edge of the earth, birther, ultra conservative lunatic fringe... not mainstream conservatives and not Republicans in general.

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Still wasn't necessary.