Why don't we just pretend Rush Limbaugh has 50 million listeners?

by Eric Boehlert
Smirking Chimp
March 10, 2009

Call it The Washington Post's 766-word non-correction correction.

It ran Saturday in the form of a Paul Farhi article about the dubious nature of trying to measure the size of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience. Farhi stressed that trying to determine the total number of weekly listeners represented an exercise "in guesswork, slippery methodology and suspect data."

The article detailed how there aren't any hard ratings numbers within the radio industry regarding Limbaugh's audience size -- a topic of increased interest since the AM talker had emerged as the public face of the Republican Party under the Obama administration.

Farhi helped put the ratings question issue in proper context, but the unspoken point of the piece seemed to be to walk back the previous day's Post article by Howard Kurtz, which boldly announced in the very first sentence that Limbaugh's ratings had "nearly doubled" since the recent controversy with Obama began in January. It was a pro-Limbaugh proclamation that went off like a firecracker, especially online, as conservatives cheered the news and mocked Democrats for padding Limbaugh's audience.

(More here.)