The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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August 05, 2005
Air America ratings up 1,000,000% in Laurel, Indiana So we have this new cat at Blogcritics nom de plume Balletshooz what is obviously proud of being a wingnut of the lefty variety. Howdy, and welcome aboard this Fair and Balanced Blogcritics ride. Ahoy, matey! I know somebody needs to balance me out, for one, though I'm not really even sure exactly on which plane I'm a wingnut. Probably Slim Pickens's bomber.
However, I have to call out Balletshooz for just plain damned embarassing foolishness for this whole ongoing series of articles on the supposed groundswell of support for the liberal Air America radio network. Specifically,
Now, perhaps these Air America posts are less hostile than the malicious and unsubstantiated attacks on John Roberts and Karl Rove among others, but they're big boys. Don't think Rove sits up nights worrying about what kind of rants any bloggers are posting.
Still, these clumsy, ham handed Air America rah-rah posts are just utterly ridiculous cheerleading. The lack of even any intention of reflecting real reality just jumps right out. They are all full of little tidbits of Arbitron ratings showing how Air America is "eating Rush Limbaugh's lunch." Let's assume for the sake of argument that these numbers are real, and not just as phony as some of Balletshooz' vicious attacks.
As Mark Twain famously said, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. In reality, no significant number of people are listening to Al Franken et al. They're just not. But look, they're drawing 2% of the Latino homosexual listener demographic in Omaha in the 3am slot! They're up a billion percent!
In fact, Air America's ratings are up 1,000,000% in my hometown of Laurel, Indiana. This comes as a result of me watching five minutes of the Franken show on cable a couple of nights ago before getting bored and flipping to All in the Family. This took them from zero audience to one. From zero to one is a mathematically infinite percentage, so you can pick any number you want for that. I would have made the title "Air America ratings up 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% in Laurel, Indiana," but my fingers got tired of typing the damned zeros.
Of course, the obvious point is that percentages of growth don't necessarily mean squat. A radio station going from 1 to 10 has just experienced 1,000% growth. Plus, of course this involves cherry picking a few carefully selected bits that look good for Balletshooz' team, ignoring the other 99% of stations and demos.
Meanwhile back in reality, Rush Limbaugh actually has 10s of millions of listeners every week. Al Franken, not to put too fine a point on it, does not. I wish Limbaugh had some serious competition from the left to motivate him and keep him honest, but he does not.
Look, I appreciate a good rant as much as the next guy. President Bush certainly needs a good daily cussin'. Limbaugh's got it coming, too.
