Rush is all over the news lately; is he the head of the Republican party or not? A lot of people on both sides of the fence are making noise about how powerful Rush is, how many people he speaks for, and so forth. The number that keeps getting batted about is "20 million weekly listeners." I thought, That can't be right. 20 million is a lot. For one thing, there are only 303 million Americans (as of last July). "20 million" means that 15% of the total American public listens to Rush. To put it into perspective, "20 million" is the number of people who watched American Idol last week. Doesn't it feel like everyone watches American Idol? Does it feel like that many people listen to Rush Limbaugh? Right away, this "20 million" number is failing the plausibility test. I spent an appalling amount of time online this morning trying to track down the truth about the number of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh on a regular basis. Here's the interesting thing: I never did find out. First of all, that "20 million" number is almost certainly incomplete, if not entirely false. The source for that number is Rush himself, which should be your first clue. Furthermore, Rush Limbaugh actually states that his show reaches 20 million Americans per week. Reaches. I wasn't able to find clarification on what he means by "reaches." If I were feeling charitable, I would say that "reaches" probably means "every single person who tunes in, even those people who hear my voice and think OMG YUCK NO and flip the channel." However, it could also mean "the total possible number of people who COULD turn on their radio and hear my show." In other words, "reaches" could mean "the total number of people encompassed by the reach of every single radio station which carries my show." Which is a lot, because Rush is on a lot of stations, and AM radio signals carry far. Second of all, the "20 million" number, which Rush reports, which probably isn't accurate, is itself from an inaccurate source. "20 million" presumably is sourced from his Arbitron ratings, which are self-reported. When you participate in an Arbitron study, you write down (by hand, in a paper notebook) which radio stations you listen to, and for how long. So that's a fourth factor of reality inflation, and we're getting further and further away from "20 million" with each step. I did find some reputable information reporting that Rush's show averages a 5.4% ratings share. But 5.4% of what, exactly? It turns out that 5.4% of "share" technically means, "Out of all the radio I listened to this week, 5.4% of that time was spent listening to Rush Limbaugh." Frankly, that's a pretty sad number. One final interesting tidbit: "reach" happens to be a statistical term used in ratings systems to define the number of people who have listened to a show within a given span of time. This span of time is of course entirely flexible. Asking "Have you ever listened to Rush Limbaugh?" could easily produce an answer of "20 million." However, asking "Did you listen to Rush Limbaugh today?" will produce a much smaller number.