For the past week or so, the radio talkers on local Salem Radio Network 1070 KNTH have been pushing their listeners to sign an online petition called “Free Our Health Care Now.” Apparently there are several ways to access the petition, and based on what the talkers said last week regarding problems people had with the site, one can “sign” the petition multiple times on the same computer by using different email addresses.
Now I have two issues. This morning Bennett and Gallagher’s substitute were going on about the total reaching 800K. Like a telethon, each host passed the flogging of the petition to the next.
Their purported audiences, as of last December:
Bennett: 3.25 million
Gallagher: 4 million
Medved: 4 million
Prager: 1 million
Hewitt: 1.5 million
In the most generous calculation, assuming that these listeners are all the same people, we come up with an average of 2.75 million. Let’s say they reached 800K today. That means that only 29% of their listeners (assuming no duplicate email addresses) agree with the petition.
If we go with the most flattering angle, i.e. all of them have all of these different listeners, then we have a total of 13.75 million listeners. That means only 5.81% of their listeners agree with them (again, given there are no duplicate emails on the petition).
I’d say either way is an epic fail.
I woke up early enough this morning to call Bennett’s show and ask about this, but I thought better of it. Seth would probably have hung up on me again like he did last week and has several times in the past.
The second issue is the validity of the numbers in the first place.
No one except my friends, well and you dear readers (who often overlap) knows what radio stations I listen to. Keeping this info under wraps is important. Just how many people really listen to AM radio anymore? I even find myself tiring of it. Going on two years of Obama bashing and racist bashing at the local level (both of African American and Latinos in the immigration debate) have almost put me at my limit. I emphasize almost.
It’s almost sad, what with the pleading for African Americans to return to the Republican Party and the Birther Madness.
I guess you could say that at least this effort has surpassed the “Impeach Obama” failure earlier this year.