Popular Radio Shows in The United States
Talkers Magazine compiles Arbitron's data, along with other sources, to estimate the minimum weekly audiences of various commercial long-form talk radio shows. NPR and APM compile Arbitron's data for its public radio shows and releases analysis through press releases.
| Program | Format | Daypart | Weekly Listeners in Millions |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Rush Limbaugh Show | Conservative talk | Midday | 14+ |
| The Sean Hannity Show | Conservative talk | East Coast PM Drive | 13.25+ |
| Morning Edition | Public news | AM Drive | 12.3 |
| All Things Considered | Public news/talk | PM Drive | 11.8 |
| Marketplace | Public news | PM Drive | 9+ |
| Delilah | Adult contemporary | Evenings | 8+ |
| The Dave Ramsey Show | Financial talk | Midday | 7.75+ |
| Glenn Beck Program | Conservative talk | West Coast AM Drive | 7.5+ |
| The Mark Levin Show | Conservative talk | West Coast PM Drive | 7.5+ |
| Fresh Air | Public news/talk | Midday | 4.5 |
| A Prairie Home Companion | Public old-time radio | Weekends | 4+ |
| Coast to Coast AM | Paranormal talk | Overnights | 3.5+ |
| Talk of the Nation | Public talk | Midday | 3.2 |
| Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! | Public panel game show | Weekends | 3.2 |
| After MidNite with Blair Garner | Country music | Overnights | 2.7 |
| The Lia Show | Country music | Evenings | 2+ |
Note on dayparts: because of the effects of time on North American broadcasting, nationally syndicated shows that air live will end up on different dayparts in different time zones. The above list makes note of this. Note that although shows such as Beck's and Levin's are listed under "West Coast" drive times, that their shows are based on the East Coast (and thus air in early midday and early evening time slots there). Their dayparts are indicated as such for the purposes of clarity and consistency.
The list is heavily skewed toward conservative talk radio and public radio due to the greater availability of data for those formats; other formats, particularly those for music, are not measured in as much detail, in part due to irregularities in scheduling.
Sirius XM Radio was monitored directly by Arbitron from 2007 to early 2008. The latest numbers available, from early 2008 (prior to when XM and Sirius merged), have The Howard Stern Show being the most listened-to show on either platform, with Stern's Howard 100 channel netting a "cume" of 1.2 million listeners and Howard 101 (the secondary and replay channel) netting an additional 500,000 listeners. Eastlan Ratings, a service that competes with Arbitron in several markets, includes satellite radio channels in its local ratings; Howard 100 has registered above several lower-end local stations in the markets Eastlan serves, the only satellite station to do so.
The highest rated local talk program in the United States is John and Ken in Los Angeles. Talkers estimates their audience at 1 million listeners.
Because of the large advantage the English language has in the United States, virtually all of the most-listened-to radio programs in the United States are in English. The only other language with an audience large enough to establish national networks is Spanish, and data for shows in that language are much more limited. Other languages (Chinese, Korean, various languages of India, and French) are broadcast only on a local level and thus would be unable to achieve the reach necessary to appear on these lists.
Read more about this topic: List Of Most-listened-to Radio Programs
Famous quotes containing the words united states, popular, radio, shows, united and/or states:
“I thought it altogether proper that I should take a brief furlough from official duties at Washington to mingle with you here to-day as a comrade, because every President of the United States must realize that the strength of the Government, its defence in war, the army that is to muster under its banner when our Nation is assailed, is to be found here in the masses of our people.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin—preludes, etudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will’s need to will is no less strong than Reason’s need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.”
—A.J.P. (Alan John Percivale)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)