Pat Dollard

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Radio Equalizer:

THE NUMBERS GAME

Olbermann & Friends Twist Limbaugh’s Ratings Data

Can deranged MSNBC host Keith Olbermann really claim to have more viewers than talk titan Rush Limbaugh has radio listeners?

Using twisted “logic” possibly derived from Million Man Math Made Easy, Olby decided on Friday’s show to take a low-ball audience figure of 14,000,000 (as opposed to the widely accepted 20,000,000 count), inexplicably divide it by ten, then declare the “results” lower than his 1,486,000 viewers during Thursday’s show.

On Friday, by the way, Olbermann had just over a million watching, less than one-third that of Bill O’Reilly, his direct competitor.

From the transcript:

OLBERMANN: The “Washington Post” today quoted a radio analyst who said the Limbaugh ho-hum; I have boasted his ratings, from the claim of 14 million listeners to 25 million. Either number would dwarf the daily audience of, say, this program, which is just under 1.5 million viewers last night or would dwarf Bill O‘Reilly‘s, which is just under 4 million, or would dwarf even “NBC Nightly News,” which average 9.3 million viewers last week per night. Except the 14 million Limbaugh listeners appear to be closer to just 1.4 million.

This is about the different ways radio audiences are counted, compared to television one. In TV, audience estimates are available for every show, every hour, every half hour, every quarter hour, every minute in some cases. If we say this newshour had an audience of 1,486,000 last night, that is the average audience total throughout the hour — 1,486,000 at 8:09 p.m., 1,486,000 at 8:42.

But in radio, the rating is called the “cume.” It measures the number of people who listen to a program like Limbaugh‘s, whether they listen for one second a week, or for 15 hours or a week. And one industry source told us today that the standard way to estimate how many people are listening to a radio show at a given hour or day is to divide the cume by 10.

I‘m joined now by “Variety” television editor, Michael Schneider, who knows that field and radio very well.

Mr. Schneider, thanks for your time tonight.

MICHAEL SCHNEIDER, VARIETY: No problem.

OLBERMANN: So, is that math, in your knowledge, more or less correct? I mean, if Limbaugh has 14 million listeners a week in a way radio measures it, does that mean he actually has 1,400,000 per show the way television would measure it?

SCHNEIDER: Yes. It‘s tough to say because there‘s no good way to measure minute-by-minute on radio because radio is not measured the same way TV is. But that sounds like a decent number. And when you think about radio and the fact that there are no real radio networks the way there are television networks, that‘s still a pretty strong number for a daytime radio show.

OLBERMANN: But, of course, you and I will sit there and we can analyze it and we say that‘s a fantastic number for radio, and there‘s no way of denying that. But people who—even are politically-conscious people, or media-conscious people, they may love numbers and they may love ratings and they may love lists and rankings, but rarely does anybody want to do any actual math. So, if anybody actually thinks of this at all, they say, they hear—Limbaugh, 14 million; Olbermann, 1.5 million, Maddow, 1.25 million. Why don‘t Limbaugh and his supporters make it clear that there is some, if not creative counting going on here, certainly some apples and oranges are going on here?

SCHNEIDER: Right. I mean, it‘s definitely apples and oranges. And I supposed it‘s not to their benefit to sit down and explain the differences between radio Arbitron ratings and TV Nielsen ratings, because that 14 million number, obviously, looks a lot more impressive. So, yes, I think it‘s up to the rest of us to do our homework and make sure we know what a radio rating means.

OLBERMANN: Is this going to change? Because Limbaugh even pointed out this today to a supporter in an email, there are daily ratings taken now in about the top 15 markets, but I have not seen them yet. It is apples and oranges, yet the way they‘re counted, it turns out every apple is counted 10 times and every orange is counted once. Why are the audiences for the two media counted in such different ways and is it ever going to be even out?

SCHNEIDER: Yes. I mean, it starting to and that radio finally has caught up the TV in the major markets like L.A., New York, Boston. They now have personal people meters. So, for the first time, Arbitron is actually giving radio stations real ratings—a real number on who‘s listening to what as opposed to before where it was all based on diaries, so radio stations had to depend on people basically trying to remember what they listened to and writing it down in a diary the way TV was done about 30 years ago.

So, radio still has some catching up to do. It‘s just tougher because radio, it‘s all about the markets and individual radio stations. There‘s no major network the way there is in TV.

OLBERMANN: Yes. In my radio days, we used to have the spring book which we would get in late summer and we‘d find out how we were doing three months ago. Lastly -

SCHNEIDER: Yes. And that‘s still the way it is for most of the country.

Beyond delusional fantasy, what made Olbermann decide to divide Limbaugh’s ratings by ten? Who knows, it wasn’t exactly explained and certainly doesn’t make sense. It was probably made up out of thin air. Who interviews a television editor about radio ratings, anyway?

Using this formula, what would liberal talk radio’s final audience figure look like?

Let’s assume he was trying to determine an average overall audience size. If so, Premiere Radio Networks, Limbaugh’s syndicator, has told the Washington Post the most recent data, nearly a year old, gives a figure of 3,590,000, not 1,400,000 as Olbermann’s fuzzy math suggests.

Another lie: that any radio host could get diary credit for one mere second of listening. According to Arbitron, it takes five minutes of continuous listening for a station to gain quarter-hour ratings credit.

If Olby is interested, more factual information is available here from Arbitron’s site.

But Olbermann is hardly the only one twisting and contorting ratings to fit his personal political agenda. It’s done routinely in broadcasting, whether to question a successful host’s ratings, as was done in the WaPo Limbaugh piece, or hype the underperformance of a low-rated MSNBC host.

On Monday’s show, Limbaugh himself made clear he’s not behind reports of “doubled ratings” for his program. In fact, the source is surprising: the publisher of a trade publication sometimes considered hostile to conservative talk radio. From his program:

CALLER: I’m not that confused. Okay, and then the second thing is, have your ratings doubled since Begala and, what, the bald guy there, have been attacking you?

RUSH: There is absolutely no way of knowing this.

CALLER: Okay. Because I heard these reports on TV, and I was just saying that, you know, these freaking liberals can’t get anything right.

RUSH: Well, this ratings business, can’t blame that one all on the liberals. Well, yeah, I guess you could, but not liberals in the media. Radio ratings are a curious thing. There are two ways that they’re taken right now. One is the old-fashioned way, a diary, where people fill a diary out for a week, send it back to the rating company to get tabulated every month, and then every three months the report comes out. There’s a new device called a personal people meter, portable people meter where people actually wear a device on their belts and radio signals are encoded and whatever they’re listening to is picked up by this thing, and it’s in about the top 10 to 15 markets.

It just started a year ago. They test marketed Houston and Philadelphia, and according to the personal people meter data, which they get data every day, yeah, things are through the roof on this program, but, you know, it’s tough to know because not all radio stations are reporting them. You can’t say that on 15 radio stations, which is all we get day-to-day information from right now, you can’t take those 15 when you’re on 600 and say things have doubled. Now, some trade expert made that claim, but there’s nobody that knows that, we won’t know that for a while. Radio ratings have a lot of vagaries to them.

When you’re on 600 radio stations, as am I, some of those radio stations have good books and some have bad books every time. You never have a period where every radio station shows gains, nor do you have a period where every radio station shows losses.

So we at the EIB Network, we measure things in far multiple ways other than just audience listenership. We do it with revenue and a number of other things, too. Suffice it to say that we have probably never had higher ratings than what we have now, and we probably never had a higher time spent listening than we have now. But to say that it has doubled is something nobody knows yet, and I certainly would not make that claim.

In the end, while Limbaugh gives honest answers regarding his listenership, his foes have come up with increasingly-creative ways of undermining him. If only they could invest that kind of energy into building their own ratings!