Clear Channel laying off thousands while giving Limbaugh $38 million a year.

madfloridian

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Thu May-07-09 02:31 PM
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Clear Channel laying off thousands while giving Limbaugh $38 million a year.

I wonder how some of those laid off radio hosts, producers, directors, anchors....feel about that?

From Media Matters:

Clear Channel implodes while Rush Limbaugh lives large

Drowning under massive debt and desperate to cut more costs, Clear Channel took an ax to its payroll -- again -- and hacked hundreds of radio pros out the door. Program directors, morning show hosts, production pros, news anchors -- all of them tossed over the side. A "bloodbath," one newspaper called it. (In Albany, New York, the entire on-air staff at a Clear Channel music station was sacked; same with a radio outpost in Exeter, New Hampshire)

The most recent blizzard of pink slips (one industry report pegged it at "nearly 1,000") came in the wake of a January purge, in which 1,850 Clear Channel employees were let go. So already this year the company has shed nearly 3,000 employees, or 12 percent of its workforce. Also, last week, Clear Channel's parent company announced it was suspending its matching contributions to employee 401(k) retirement programs.

Clear Channel, the conservative-friendly media behemoth with a soft spot for right-wing radio -- and which emerged earlier this decade as the poster child for everything that's wrong with runaway media consolidation (aka "The Evil Empire") -- is now hanging on for dear life. "It's a house of cards," radio watcher and Clear Channel expert Alec Foege recently told me, noting the company's crippling debt payments, which are due at a time when advertising revenues are vanishing. (Foege is author of 2008's Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.)

But what about Rush Limbaugh?

And yet Clear Channel's most famous employee, Rush Limbaugh, remains oblivious to it all. I sometimes wonder what Limbaugh thinks when he reads about the not-so-slow-motion collapse of his radio employer while lounging in his 24,000-square-foot Florida estate or motoring in his $450,000 car to the airport to ride in his $54 million jet. Does Limbaugh feel bad? Does he feel a little guilty? And does he ever think about giving some of his riches back so that thousands of radio colleagues wouldn't have to be bounced to the curb?

And I wonder what those pink-slipped Clear Channel employees -- some of whom spent decades working for the company -- think about Limbaugh as they're ordered out the station door and onto "the beach." (That's radio-speak for unemployment.)

Did you know that on that in addition to the 24,000 square foot estate in Palm Beach that there are 4 more homes on the property and 6 cars worth about half a million each? I wonder if that has sunk in to those radio hosts who got laid off, to the producers and directors of their shows?

Rush Limbaugh...5 homes in Palm Beach, 6 cars about half a million each.

�ANTICIPATING A QUESTION,� Limbaugh said when we pulled into the garage of his secluded beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, �why do I have so many cars?�

I hadn�t actually been wondering that. Very rich people tend not to stint on transportation. For example, we drove to the house from the studio, Limbaugh at the wheel, in a black Maybach 57S, which runs around $450,000 fully loaded. He had half a dozen similar rides on his estate.

�I have these cars for two reasons,� Limbaugh said. �First, they are for the use of my guests. And two, I happen to love fine automobiles.�

He also loves space. There are five homes � all of them his � on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He�s been married three times but has no children.

Limbaugh informed me that I was the first journalist ever to enter his home. Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant, calls the place �aspirational,� which is one adjective that fits. The place, largely designed by Limbaugh himself, reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. The massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York. The gleaming cherry-wood floors are dotted with hand-woven oriental carpets. A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

In a recent interview with Rush Limbaugh Barbara Walters pointed out that the new contract he just signed is worth $38 million a year.

Video from ABC of Walters and Limbaugh