Philadelphia Inquirer: Franken Squashed Like a Bug

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It's tough to keep it all straight. Air America, embroiled in a scandal here, falling off the Arbitron ratings chart there... it all gets a bit confusing. The Philadelphia Inquirer -- no shill for red-staters -- weighs in with some key money lines:

Here [in Philadelphia, Air America] doesn't even register a pulse. The flagship show, hosted by author and former Saturday Night Live comic Al Franken, airs from noon to 3 p.m. weekdays on WHAT (1340 AM). Both WHAT and the show have fallen off the charts, according to radio-rating service Arbitron, meaning there were too few listeners to measure during the second quarter of this year - the so-called spring book. Franken's show didn't start on the station until Aug. 30. Franken named his show The O'Franken Factor to tweak his archrival, populist pundit Bill O'Reilly, whose TV show The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel outdraws all other talk shows on cable... Franken... [also] ...chose to go head-to-head with... Limbaugh in many markets. This, it turns out, was not such a good idea. Limbaugh, still the giant among talkers, with 14.75 million listeners on 600 stations, has squashed Franken like a bug. Franken's ratings have dropped 50 percent in Boston since spring 2004, and he is down 14 percent in New York, where his listeners now number fewer than 188,000...

Inquirer: Liberal Air America Radio stuck in cellar