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I use to listen to Rush on KNBR (I think that's what it was then) In any case, they would interrupt his show for Baseball and I'd have to get up and find another station.

It was KNBR-AM who brought Rush to the Bay Area on a daily basis. KGO-AM, the longtime top rated ABC-owned station in San Francisco, played the best of Rush on weekend afternoons when he first went national. KNBR had Giants baseball, Warriors basketball and sports talk in the evening, but still had DJs and MOR (middle-of-the-road) music filling the early morning through evening drive hours.

As music on AM fell out of favor with stereo-craving listeners (especially after the colossal failure of the concept of AM Stereo) and the retirement of morning drive legend Frank Dill, KNBR started with talk shows during the afternoon when there was no sports programming. Although he was exploding throughout the rest of the nation, it was thought Rush would never sell in looney left San Francisco, and KNBR brought him from the shadows on KGO to the Bay Area live five mornings a week. Surprise, surprise -- KNBR beat KGO 9am-Noon for the first time in decades.

KNBR listeners weren't all happy with Rush. One creative attempt to get him dumped was when callers to Giants post-game talk shows used racial slurs about black players, which were then blamed on supposedly racist Limbaugh listeners who stuck around for the games. Nobody fell for it. Rush was replayed Midnight-3am as well as the 9-Noon live slot. KNBR was the top-rated sports station in the nation, and that was partially due to the fact 25% of the programming was Rush.

Rush was firmly ensconced at KNBR until ABC outbid it to get him back in 1999, bringing him to KSFO, purchased by Disney, ABC's parent company. After abandoning a standards/MOR format years earlier, KSFO failed with a mixed-bag of liberal talkers (including Tom Leykis) and Dr. Laura in the evenings and had switched to a lineup of brash, amateurish and almost unlistenable right-wingers (J. Paul Emerson being the most forgettable), and had righted itself (pun intended) with former KGO hosts Lee Rodgers and Jim Eason, Geoff Metcalf, and former ABC reporter Melanie Morgan. Also joining was former KGO fill-in host Michael Savage, who has become a star (and a bestselling author) in his own right.

"KNBR listeners weren't all happy with Rush. One creative attempt to get him dumped was when callers to Giants post-game talk shows used racial slurs about black players, which were then blamed on supposedly racist Limbaugh listeners who stuck around for the games"

Don't blame that one on listeners! That was orchestrated by Gary Radinich, who was quite displeased with rush's sucess at 'his' station. Mike Cleary also made a few attempts to garner support for a 'dump Rush' agenda, but failed.