To do permanent harm to the talk radio host, the activists aligning against him — largely via social media — would have to expand and sustain their advertiser boycott for months, experts said. The analysts don’t expect that to happen, though they acknowledged that, even for the reliably outrageous Limbaugh, targeting a virtually unknown private citizen with sexually charged vitriol was problematic new territory.
“This is more serious than what we have seen before,” said Jeffrey Berry, a Tufts University political science professor who studies radio and TV commentators. “But my guess is that it will be short-lived and that other advertisers will come into the marketplace after a suitable interval to replace the ones that have gone away.”…
Berry, the Tufts professor, and Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers, said that Limbaugh’s audience is large and attractive enough to advertisers that others will eventually take up the slack.
“As long as Limbaugh maintains that major audience and has the brains to apologize when he says something that really was uncalled for, like this, there will be new advertisers who will fill in those positions,” Harrison said. “Since when has the American advertising industry been concerned with taste?”
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