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How would Pittsburgh radio have changed if WTAE had kept Rush Limbaugh?

P

Pratte4Life

No, not KQV keeping Jeff Christy .

The thread about WPTT has got me to wonder- what if in the early 90s WTAE decides to keep Rush Limbaugh instead of letting him go to KDKA?

Rush's show actually debuted in Pittsburgh around 1990 on tape delay on the weekends. I remember Lynn Cullen complaining about him in such a way I thought WTAE was hiring the next Howard Stern on the airwaves.

So I had to listen, and as a result my entire political philosophy changed.

But enough of the bio sketch- WTAE had something of a left-wing slant at that time- especially with Cullen and Larry King on overnights.

And as a result, whoever was programming the station thought he was a fad, thought that he was too shallow, and let him go to KDKA.

It says here KDKA was able to hold off WDVE for 15 more years as a result (at that time WDVE really was making their first moves to take control of the market with a then-fresh Paulsen and Krenn and a hey dey era for rock music). Love him or hate him, there's no doubt Limbaugh has an audience to this day and KDKA's fall from grace after his depature to 104.7 speaks volumes.

My question is what if they kept him? What if they put Rush on from 12-3 and moved Hoerth to 9-11 after the sports shows?

What would have happened?

It says here-

WDVE would have taken control of the market in the early 90s.

WTAE would never have gone all sports. You get the idea they might have evolved into a 104.7 type station in time- and with similar success- FM or no.

KDKA might have gone all sports- getting the contracts of ALL the teams in the market (keeping hold of the Pens, grabbing Pitt for a song when they were available, wresting the Steelers from a more politically based WTAE). With their signal and because of the market- they would have become the highest rated sports station in America.


We'd have an Air America affiliate on either The Edge, WBGG or WPTT right now.

104.7 would be JACK.

WRRK would be . . . who knows?
 
Interesting theory. But would Rush's affiliate relations really have passed up ANY chance to get on 1020, the biggest signal in Pittsburgh (and really one of two usable ones)? I mean, Rush has appeared in the past on differently-formatted stations, so smack in the middle of a (Rome-less) sports station isn't that unheard of.

But you play an interesting game of what-if. I like it.
 
I don't think this would have happened. Rush's M.O. has always been to bump up to the bigger signal wherever possible
(ex...off of WXYT 5kW to WJR 50kW in Detroit, off of WCOL to a much clearer WTVN in Columbus, etc. Sooner or
later he would have gone to KD if they'd have him. (plus he was not exactly thrilled with the way that TAE handled
his TV show)
 
In my theory- and it is plausible- KDKA would be all sports and I think maybe would be better off.

It would have completely changed the face of Pittsburgh radio. Who knows- maybe WTAE would have gone to FM years before 104.7 did for FM Talk- Quinn and Rose would have been on the station as the morning show instead of WRRK- Mark Madden would be the nation's foremost bad guy wrestler- etc.
 
"But would Rush's affiliate relations really have passed up ANY chance to get on 1020, the biggest signal in Pittsburgh (and really one of two usable ones)?"

Phrase that question differently. Would Rush's affiliate stations really deliberately put Rush on the flagship station of the Pittsburgh Pirates where his show would be frequently bumped for baseball just to get redundant signals in Pittsburgh's fringe hinterlands if they had an alternative with an adequate signal and guaranteed no preemption for baseball?

Had WTAE cleared Rush's radio show live and guaranteed they would never replace him with a baseball game, he might have stayed on WTAE radio. That would give WTAE-TV a strong incentive to push his TV show better. Then Hearst might well have moved their talk programming over to 96.1 and not sold any of their stations to CC.

If CC couldn't buy the two stations that carried the Steelers in order to get the Steelers for WDVE, then maybe 'DVE's story would be much different.
 
Limbaugh was on KDKA in middays and was rarely pre-empted by baseball. "Frequently" is dead wrong when you consider there wasn't a single baseball-related pre-emption six months out of the year and probably no more than a dozen in the other six months.

Yes, KDKA's 50kw, even with the occasional baseball pre-emption, is much more valuable than WTAE's 5kw that doesn't even cover all of Allegheny County. For Limbaugh's syndicator, that choice is automatic.

The TV show is an entirely separate issue. TV doesn't take its orders from radio. The Limbaugh TV show was a loser nationwide and WTAE-TV deservedly buried it in a graveyard time slot until the contract ran out.
 
Boss Radio,

You really don't have the slightest clue about how a game of "what if?" is played, do you?

This thread is about hypothetical speculation about what might have happened if things were different. That requires making assumptions about things that didn't really happen.

It doesn't matter why, for the sake of this hypothetical speculative discussion, Limbaugh stayed at WTAE. What matters is speculating about how things might have turned out if things had been different.
 
"What's the point?"

It's fun. It's interesting. It exercises the mind. (BTW, those are three things you can't say about most of what's on the radio nowadays).

""What if" JFK hadn't gone to Dallas?"

There was an interesting movie made about that idea a while back. I'll bet you didn't see it.
 
Radio_Realist said:
"What's the point?"

It's fun. It's interesting. It exercises the mind. (BTW, those are three things you can't say about most of what's on the radio nowadays).

""What if" JFK hadn't gone to Dallas?"

There was an interesting movie made about that idea a while back. I'll bet you didn't see it.
Click to expand...


Question: "What if" Radio Realist weren't such a [EDIT]?

Answer: This would be a better board.

[EDIT-namecalling]
 
Yeah, when one can't come up with anything worth saying, there's always insulting someone.

Let me guess, you work on the air as a talk show host.
 
The thing about Limbaugh's affiliates is that he obviously approved going to 104.7 over the signal of KDKA- so- I'm thinking if WTAE had given him some commitment he might have stayed.
 
Pratte4Life said:
The thing about Limbaugh's affiliates is that he obviously approved going to 104.7 over the signal of KDKA- so- I'm thinking if WTAE had given him some commitment he might have stayed.
Click to expand...

WHY would he have stayed on an AM station whose signal didn't even cover all of Allegheny County, much less the Arbitron survey area?
 
"That's been your method for a long time, hasn't it?"

Only in response to Dr. Detroit.

"WHY would he have stayed on an AM station whose signal didn't even cover all of Allegheny County"

This isn't about whether or not the hypothetical situation that didn't happen might have, this is about what might have happened if things had been different.

You really don't have an imagination, do you? That would mean I was wrong to think you were a local talk show host. You must work in local radio programming.
 
Taking a break from the "Dukes of Hazzard" DVDs, are you?

You know, this could be (and should be) a site for discussion among people who really know their stuff. Instead, it's overrun by one boob who was formerly obsessed with billboards and who now ends any discssuion by saying, hell, radio sucks anyway.

End of lecture.

Now you can get back to the imaginative, creative discussion of who would win a fair fight between Superman and Batman.
 
Again, Boss, if you knew your stuff, you wouldn't have to resort to these insults.

Regardless whether or not you think our "obsessions" are your pot of tea or not, this board has been kept, for the most part, courteous.

You might want to try it.
 
Boss Radio said:
You know, this could be (and should be) a site for discussion among people who really know their stuff. Instead, it's overrun by one boob who was formerly obsessed with billboards and who now ends any discssuion by saying, hell, radio sucks anyway.
Click to expand...

How much discussion by the folks who "really know their stuff" is needed to keep plugging songs into formats bought from consultants based on what other consultants told you about which songs to plug and when?

Of course, you could always pat each other on the back for all of your success at squeezing pretty much every ounce of entertainment out of most local radio programming. That's not as easy as it looks. If you aren't really, really careful, something entertaining could sneak onto your station's programming. Then what would you do?
 
Pratte4Life said:
Again, Boss, if you knew your stuff, you wouldn't have to resort to these insults.

Regardless whether or not you think our "obsessions" are your pot of tea or not, this board has been kept, for the most part, courteous.

You might want to try it.
Click to expand...

Are you the referee here? Are you the moderator? Or just another [EDIT] AC/DC fan in red boots?

Don't preach to me when your [EDIT] "Realist" throws insults all the time.

[EDIT-namecalling]
 
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