Rush Limbaugh, the Beeth­oven of Amer­ican talk radio, explains his suc­cess in the NYT:

“Do you know what bought me all this?” [Limbaugh] asked, wav­ing his hand in the gen­eral dir­ec­tion of his prosper­ity. “Not my polit­ical ideas. Con­ser­vat­ism didn’t buy this house. First and fore­most I’m a busi­ness­man. My first goal is to attract the largest pos­sible audi­ence so I can charge con­fis­cat­ory ad rates. I hap­pen to have great enter­tain­ment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.”

I hate to quote myself (or Mike even), but this is from Can You Trust The Media? (p.55):

The media is not in the inform­a­tion sup­ply busi­ness. It is in the dis­trac­tion busi­ness. It wants to occupy the seconds, minutes and hours of our lives that are not spent earn­ing the money required to make us valu­able to busi­nesses as a con­sumer or gov­ern­ments as a tax­payer, and as much of our work­ing time as it can. It is there to force itself into our con­scious­ness and by doing so, live another day.