Are Stern’s viscous attacks on Bush helping Bush’s poll ratings? The reason could be that Stern’s own public ratings, Opinion Dynamics Corporation March 3-4, were overwhelming: 70% unfavorable, 14% favorable, 12% no opinion, 4% never heard of him.
Obviously, a lot of Democrats and Independents don’t like Stern too. Stern’s rants against Bush to people who dislike Stern, many of the 16 million who listen to him, might be helping Bush. Bush has improved his position by a whopping 7%, all while Stern was conducting his extreme Bush bashing over the past three weeks. Here are the latest poll results CNN March 29:
"Among likely voters surveyed, 51 percent said they would choose Bush for president, while 47 percent said they would vote for Kerry, within the margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Three weeks ago, as Kerry was cinching the Democratic nomination with a string of primary victories, he led the president by 8 points in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup among likely voters, 52 percent to 44 percent."
What twickster said. If I were Karl Rove, I’d be more concerned about the possibility of Stern convincing his fans not to vote for Bush in November – last I checked, he still has a sizable audience, and his recent treatment by the FCC might just annoy enough of them to make an effort to vote against Bush.
There have been SO many factors influencing those poll ratings. For example, Bush and company have put out a lot of advertising over the past few weeks, while the Kerryites spent a lot of their money on the primary. I just don’t think Stern’s had that much impact.
Howard Stern really doesn’t have much exposure outside of his radio show - he’s not on the news or widely interviewed - so the only people hearing what he has to say will likely be those who presumably have a decent opinion of him, those who listen to his show.
I question your assumption that “many” of his listeners dislike him. Granted, some people will listen to radio or tv personalities that they hate just for the fun of it, but I really don’t think that they make up a significant proportion of his audience.
From the show’s own trailers and an example from his book:
“Howard Stern, a well-known “radio shock jock,” was one of the first to break many of the rules while on the air. In his semi-autobiography, “Private Parts,” the story goes that people who loved him had a tendency to listen to his show for about an hour. But people who hated him listened up to two to three hours. Maybe its because they wanted to see what hell say next.”
Okay, interesting, but that doesn’t mean that the majority of his listeners, or even a significant minority of them, hate him. Perhaps those that hate him AND listen to him listen to him for longer than those who like him and listen to him, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who hates him listens to him for 2-3 hours. You’re going to have to come up with more data to convince me that that much of his audience actually hates him.
