One Year After Limbaugh Attacks, 2471 Lost Sponsors is No Fluke
Lest we forget, here are the highlights:
Susan Fluke … so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills.
What does that make her? It makes her a slut right? It makes her a prostitute! She wants to be paid to have sex
Ms. Fluke…Who bought your condoms in the 6th grade?
She’s having so much sex it’s amazing she can still walk.
Random hook-ups that these babes are encountering here … having sex nearly 3 times a day.
Ms Fluke and the rest of you FemiNazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex…then we want something in return, Ms. Fluke, and that would be the videos of this sex posted online so we can see.
There’s more—a lot more. Although you can’t find the transcript on Rush Limbaugh’s website, which otherwise contains a meticulous archival treasure trove of hate speech. He erased it when he realized what he had done.
When Rush Limbaugh launched this 3 day tirade against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke exactly one year ago, he unleashed the beast. Thousands of people who had grown tired of this hateful gasbag spreading venom on the radio, then going home and rolling around on piles of $100 bills finally decided to act.
The result was the creation of StopRush—an experimental social media movement including such activist communities as a Facebook group called “Join the Fight to Flush Rush Limbaugh” .
If you get your news from NBC, you might think that the uproar over Limbaugh’s assault on women had died. You’d be dead wrong. StopRush is low profile, but it is very, very active.
Every day hundreds of volunteers monitor the show, record ad data to identify sponsors of the show, then make this data available to the public in the StopRush database . Throughout the week, others use this user-friendly contact info to fire off emails, tweets, and Facebook messages to sponsors, many of whom have no idea their ad is even airing on this offensive show. Those sponsors then call the station to let them know they want nothing to do with Rush Limbaugh.
These volunteers are very dedicated. One has entered 10,284 separate ad reports into our sponsor database and attributes this mind-boggling number to a “lack of supervision.”
Here are some of the numbers to show how busy StopRush has been over the past year:
Sponsors moved from active to inactive: 2471
Total sponsors listed: 6825
Ad reports entered: 57,565
Reports entered last 30 days: 6,417
Unique visitors: 29,903
Rush Limbaugh famously dismissed the efforts of StopRush last spring by referring to his sponsor exodus as “losing a few french fries”. He expected to go back to the status quo. At this point it’s safe to say that will never happen. Throughout the past year Limbaugh has continued to give StopRush ammo to use to convince his advertisers that they are making a poor decision by supporting his views, including…
Suggests abortion can be stopped by requiring it occur with a gun
Claims that unidentified “scholarly research” shows Mexicans have a poor work ethic
Mocks children afraid of being shot after Newtown, CT massacre
Claims marriage equality is linked with a move to normalize pedophilia
Says African American Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has “outlived her usefulness on the plantation”
Like clockwork Limbaugh keeps churning out hate speech. And like clockwork, his advertisers hear from StopRush what his repugnant views are and call their radio stations to pull their ads.
Just yesterday a mortgage company in Los Angeles advertising on KFI sent this email to a StopRush volunteer after receiving the transcript of Limbaugh’s slavery jokes about Sheila Jackson Lee:
I was unaware of these comments and as result - will be pulling our advertising from the Rush Limbaugh show - thanks for letting us know.
Regards
As advertisers have bolted, their places have been filled in a variety of ways. Some stations have dead air for up to 4 minutes at a time. Some slots are filled with non-paying PSAs, although many of these organizations, including the Girl Scouts, Peace Corps, Hispanic Scholarship Fund, Army, and American Heart Association have demanded that their ads not be played—even at no financial cost to them—during Limbaugh’s Show. And of course some new advertisers have come aboard—including a plethora of erectile dysfunction remedies and even a Nashville church led by a man who murdered a Sunday School teacher for getting paint on his boots.
It’s hard to calculate StopRush’s effect on Limbaugh’s revenue. His parent company Premiere Radio Networks is private and not required to disclose financial information. However, Clear Channel Media Holdings (which owns Premiere) just reported losses of $424 million for 2012. Radio company Dial Global’s stock is down 88% over the past year and the company has publicly acknowledged that the movement against Limbaugh has contributed to its financial woes. Cumulus Media CEO Lew Dickey has also admitted that the backlash has been a “drag” on his business.
StopRush has clearly changed the face of talk radio and is making Limbaugh’s hatred much more expensive than it was before the attack on Sandra Fluke.
As this movement enters its second year, please consider helping us maintain our momentum by volunteering your time and voice!!
You can lend your voice to the StopRush movement in the following places:
Join: The Flush Rush Facebook community
Visit: The StopRush sponsor database
Tweet: #stoprush Twitter campaign