BREAKING: The Ratings Go Up, the Ratings Go Down

Thanks to Anonymous 718 for passing along the latest ratings in a comment to the last post:

October Sports Radio Ratings

The Ticket is still comfortably ahead overall in prime time in the prime demo.  Cat should give The Musers a nice gift card to All-Pro Foundation Repair, as they seem to be shouldering the burden of keeping The Ticket on top when everything is averaged out.

I don't know if there is much to be made about the rest of it.  I think it's fair to say that over the last several ratings periods, The Hardline and Ben & Skin are in a pretty close battle.

All of this must be viewed against the backdrop of continuing controversy nationwide over the accuracy of radio ratings since Nielsen switched to the personal people meters.  (What other kind of a meter would a personal meter be?)  (I wrote about the controversy in this post.)  As I also wrote in that post, The Musers' steady dominance tends to undercut the argument that the methods for measuring ratings are seriously flawed -- although I think that its much broader appeal means that it will tend to weather random ratings variations better than the other shows that don't offer as much variety.

I find The Hardline/Ben & Skin race less interesting than Norm & Donovan + Bad Radio's struggles against G-Bag Nation.  Norm & Donovan are significantly behind, while this time around the delta with BaD is about the same as between The Hardline and Ben & Skin.  I guess the jump in The Ticket's ratings at noon means some people are switching from G-Bag to BaD -- but not enough to vault BaD into the lead.

 The Hardline continues to get slagged in these pages, but as I wrote after Cat's AMA, it does seem to me like Mike is making his presence felt to a greater degree than he was there for awhile.  And it makes it a better show.   Show prep seems a little better.  Not a lot, but better.  But I do hear those Confessors who are weary of the lo-info cultural criticism that seems to have become a feature of most episodes.

I've been thinking about auditing Ben & Skin and G-Bag to see if I can discern its appeal.  My very hit-and-miss listening to Ben & Skin hasn't impressed me, but I haven't really given it a fair shot.  Maybe I'll take that up.

In the meantime, your views always welcome.

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A few readers need to revisit The Rules of the Confessional.   I've rejected several comments lately that were fine with the exception of entirely unnecessary shots or insults of other Confessors.  That's a deletin'.