I came in this morning and asked Snerdley, because I didn’t see it, and I knew what it was going to be. I was zapped. I got in late last night from Los Angeles, played golf yesterday. I’ll tell you, what a weekend out there. I filmed nine hours in the studio, two locations on Saturday for the 1/2 Hour News Hour, and then played golf yesterday with a couple buddies in Bel Air. I rolled in here about 10:30 last night, had to do some work because I’d been out of pocket on the news for most of the weekend. I went to bed about 1:30, two o’clock, so I didn’t get up to see what the Today Show did today, but I knew what they were going to do before they did it because I predicted it to you on Friday. I just want you to know what happened. We sent them reams of data. H.R. spoke to the producer three times Friday afternoon. They interviewed Michael Medved about it to get a voice agreeing with my side. They didn’t use him at all. They just used this hack from the George Soros funded front group for the Democrat Party, Media Matters for America.
It’s pathetic. They’re posting the lowest ratings they’ve posted in years, they’re just barely ahead of Good Morning America — they’ve got a smaller audience than we do. They had to try to get this wrong. There’s no other way this could happen. They don’t even understand the point of the parody, ‘Barack, ‘the Magic Negro’.’ It’s a piece on Al Sharpton. It’s not even a hit piece on Obama, and everything in it was originated by libs. You know all this. Here I am doing a threequel now. This is about a fourteenquel trying to explain this, and they just don’t want to get it right. I’ve got the piece here, the audio, but I don’t even know if I want to play it. It’s just giving more attention to the Today Show and that stupid reporter that they used. It’s just a smear. This happens every day to me. All right, well, I’ll think about it.
We’ve got the immigration bill going out there. Here, get this. While NBC today is airing two and a half-month-old news, which is the ‘Barack, ‘the Magic Negro” controversy, of which there is none, over on NPR, Cokie Roberts is doing a story on the immigration bill. She quotes Democrats, she quotes Republicans, and she quotes Rush Limbaugh. The quote from me that everybody is using is that this immigration bill is the comprehensive destruction of the Republican Party act of 2007, which it is. It’s not only the destruction of the Republican Party. It has a chance, if this thing were to ever be signed into law as it exists now, has a chance to effectively eliminate the conservative movement as a powerful, relevant force in this country. I will ‘splain that as the program unfolds.
Now, the people of the Today Show, as you will hear, ‘How come nobody is mad about this? Limbaugh getting a free pass, how come nobody is mad about this?’ They will conclude that with my audience, which they also get wrong, they have it at 15 million, my audience is a little over 20 million now — they conclude it’s a niche audience. It’s a niche audience and you people out there, you’re racists, sexists, bigots, too, and that’s why I didn’t have any objection to it. It’s a niche audience. In other words, nobody outside my audience has any idea what’s happening. It’s so niche, it’s so odd, all these excuses. But clearly they’re trying to stir it up out there, and they think that’s what I’m trying to do. Like last week, ‘Is Rush trying to get noticed?’ Like I don’t have that problem, folks.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Snerdley shared with me an interesting point of view that he has on NBC’s hatchet job piece today on ‘Barack ‘the Magic Negro,” on the Today Show, and I’ve got the piece. I don’t even feel like playing it. It is so bad, I think you’re right. The more I think about it, I think they did this in a perfunctory way. I think they want me to start railing against them because the Today show’s numbers are in the tank, folks. I got the numbers here. For the week of May 7th, total viewers — now, keep in mind, for the week of May 7th — I know these are daily numbers — Today show 5,530,000 viewers. Our average quarter-hour here is about 5.2 million listeners, which the way formulas in radio work out, 20, 22 million people unduplicated during the week. During a three-hour program, we figure 12 million people tune in and out of this program during any of the three hours. ABC is at 4.8 million, almost 4.9; CBS at 2.6. The demo they lead by about 500,000, the demo 25-54.
But these are some of the worst ratings in over a decade for the Today show. Snerdley’s point was, ‘You know, they saw that little dust-up that you had with the CBS affiliate out there in Sacramento, and they saw how many website hits that little station got and all the publicity it got. I think they’re just trying to get you to give them a bump, because there’s no news value in this thing, and they didn’t present it with any news. It had no place. There was nothing to peg this story to. It’s a two and a half-month-old story and nobody is talking about it other than these Democrat front group websites.’