Robert Feder had an interesting day yesterday. First he reported that WLS was about to drop Rush Limbaugh. Then, WLS made statements that said it was completely inaccurate. My guess is that Feder didn't make that up out of thin air. Where there's smoke, there's fire. This is Tom Taylor's take on it...
If Limbaugh leaves the schedule at talk WLS (890), that would let it carry the full three hours of “Johnny B.,” in the market where he’s best-known, Chicago. He’d air 9am to noon, instead of the originally-announced 9am-11am. That would leave WLS with a hole from noon-2pm. One scenario has Cumulus and Premiere negotiating to transfer Rush to Salem’s conservative talk WIND (560). After all, Premiere’s parent iHeart set some precedents by moving Rush off his longtime L.A. affiliate (talk KFI/640) to a sister station, the new avowedly-conservative “Patriot 1150” KEIB. But – Salem has previously displayed little interest in Rush, and this would break that pattern. There was friction between Cumulus and Rush a couple of years ago, when CEO Lew Dickey mentioned a revenue issue at some talk stations. He didn’t name-check Limbaugh, but Rush took it personally. The backdrop here is the three-year-old advertising boycott against Limbaugh whose match was lit by Media Matters, then kept alive by watchdog sites like StopRush.net (February 5, 2014 NOW). What's next? If WLS really does offload Limbaugh, this will look like a Major League Baseball or NBA team trading away a player with a really large contract. Sure sounds like something’s up.
I have a funny feeling they might be thinking of putting Bruce Wolf in that timeslot. Everyone else who was taken off the air at WLS has officially been released. Unless I missed it, Bruce has not said his goodbyes yet, even though he's not on the air anymore. Putting his show between two shows he used to be a part of (Brandmeier & Dahl) makes a lot of sense to me.
