RUSH: To New Britain, Connecticut. Norman, I’m glad you called. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Just fine, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, I’m a little confused, okay, so maybe you could clarify some points for me. Are you or are you not the head of the Republican Party?
RUSH: I am not the head of the Republican Party.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: There is no —
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.
CALLER: Well, what I wanted to say is that when people are — (phone cuts out)
RUSH: Are you still there? We lost the connection? All right. Was that guy a seminar caller that we shut down, Mr. Snerdley, or was that the guy genuinely interested about what his question was?