Howard Stern will return to free radio. They all laughed when we predicted it back in April. They got mad when we said it again this weekend.
But now the New York Post has followed our lead, Drudge is headlining the story two days late-- and Tabloid Baby’s story will finally be a national topic.
Stern fans began to bombard us yeserday after we reported that Stern sidekick Artie Lange’s people emailed us, urging that we supopiort his film Beer League, which tanked over the weekend despite a heavy promotion on the Stern show.
We repeated the bottom line: Howard Stern is dead. Since he left the confines of FM radio to utter curse words for a small, paid audience on the Sirius satellite system, last December, he immediately vanished from the radar screen, lost his power to shape public opinion, and may as well be the King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin, doing a make-believe talk show in his basement.
This morning, The New York Post copies our story— and the Drudge Report trumpets it:Howard Stern may be coming back to earth-- on WPLJ or WABC. Radio insiders are reporting rampant rumors that the shock jock will "do an Opie & Anthony" and return to old-fashioned radio from the obscurity of satellite radio.
Persistent industry chatter says "some sort of mega-deal's brewing among Sirius chief Mel Karmazin, Stern and Mel's longtime associate Farid Suleman” (who) runs Citadel Broadcasting, which is buying Disney/ABC's radio division…
This much is certain: Stern has complained loudly of late about published reports that he's lost his influence and is no longer a "watercooler topic" since he bolted from CBS for Sirius in a $500 million deal last January.
His celebrity-guest bookings have all but dried up and sidekick Artie Lange's new movie "Beer League" bombed over the weekend in spite of heavy hype on Stern's show. The Post's Page Six reported last week that since his move to pay radio, traffic to Stern's Web site was down a whopping 71 percent and his search-engine action plunged a staggering 90 percent…
Stern denies the move is in place. But longtime Stern listeners will admit: Stern lies to his audience when it comes to personal and business matters. He lied about his marriage, his social life and his plans to head to satellite until it suited him to tell the truth. He'll lie about this deal until it's time to announce it officially.
Stay tuned here.
Howard Stern is apparently beginning to realize that satellite radio isn't all it's cracked up to be. (It is cracked up, isn't it?) The New York Post has it on the equivalent of good authority that Stern -- big money or no -- is at least seriously entertaining a move that would allow him to be part of the terrestrial radio universe while remaining as a Sirius Satellite Radio personality.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, of course, is that Stern no longer matters since leaving the free radio world behind... If there's anything that Howard craves more than big bucks, it's the attention that his freewheeling act generates. So when he's virtually ignored as he has been of late with his plummeting profile, Stern is not a happy boy.
So as some like Tabloid Baby have long predicted, Stern will soon be returning to a free radio near you.
LIES! LIES! LIES!! And I quote from his show,ON SIRIUS,"If I had to return to Regular Airwaves,I'd VOMIT! I hate the Commercials,the long breaks...." (This is a sniplet!)
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