I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am with James Golden, AKA Bo Snerdly, Rush Limbaugh’s executive producer
This is an interview in 2019 at Liberty University. At two minutes into the video, James brags that once Rush Limbaugh got established, the talk radio format went from 120 stations to 12,000
There is no way that that’s true or even close to true.
https://streamingradioguide.com/internet-radio.php
There are only a few more than 15,000 licensed radio stations in the United States as of 2021, if you don’t count Low Power FM, that did not exist in 2000.
If you add up political talk, sports, NPR, local full service, Spanish language talk and religious talk, maybe you can add up to 5,000 – but if that is the “talk radio” population, the baseline was not 120 stations. Public radio by itself it had more than 120 stations in 1988.