I liked James Golden when he had a radio show years ago. Well spoken and intelligent.
The “Limbaugh Legacy” programming will continue until Rush’s sponsors pull out and the ratings sink. The way EIB is doing the shows, with the guest hosts segueing into generous clips of Rush being Rush, is pretty effective.
Part of the problem is keeping the EIB network intact. Many of the biggest stations that carry the Rush show are owned by Cumulus. Rush’s syndicator is Premiere Radio Networks, which is owned by Cumulus’s biggest national competitor, I Heart Radio (formerly Clear Channel). My guess is that Cumulus terminates its relationship with EIB and puts one of its own personalities in the 12-3 slot Cumulus owns radio syndicator Westwood One, which syndicates Chris Plante, Mark Levin, Red Eye Radio (Eric Harley & Gerry McNamara), Ben Shapiro, Jim Bohannon, Michael Knowles; Cumulus also owns The John Batchelor Show as well as Mancow Mueller in Chicago.
I’ve thought they would move Chris Plante into the 12-3 slot and then put someone like Michael Knowles into the 9-12 slot. Cumulus actually has a pretty deep bench of decent local talkers, so they could easily cut the cord with EIB and suffer no financial loss.
That Cumulus would make such a move is not unprecedented, as they gave Sean Hannity the boot a few years ago (Hannity is another Premiere property, and Hannity absolutely infuriated the Dickey brothers, who run Cumulus, but continuing to pimp all his non-radio show activities).
Also, EIB affiliates such as the ones Cumulus owns have to pay a monthly fee to Premiere to run the Rush show, in addition to having to give up much of their hourly commercial spot inventory to Premiere. Cumulus would regain these hours and be able to sell all the commercial spots for its own account.
I think that however this turns out, one of the big radio operators needs to take a look at Andrew Wilkow, who has competed against Rush for years in the 12-3 slot on Sirius/XM. I’m not sure how long Wilkow is committed to Sirius/XM, but he is outstanding. If they put him together with the incredible staff Rush had at the EIB network, they could have their man. “We are right; they are wrong; the arguments made on this program cannot be broken”.