{"id":7225,"date":"2013-05-06T13:05:04","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T17:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=7225"},"modified":"2013-05-06T13:05:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T17:05:04","slug":"who-is-cumulus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=7225","title":{"rendered":"Who is Cumulus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Old thread<\/a><\/p>\n

The anonymous “source” for the Politico story is someone “close to Rush”, but appears connected with WABC and Cumulus. Rush doesn’t work for Cumulus and hasn’t worked from the WABC studio in probably 8 years.<\/p>\n

Rush owns his own production company. Bo Snerdly (James Golden) is paid by Rush, not Premiere. Rush has complete control over the content of his program, including the advertisements that appear on affiliates stations during his how. Rush gets whatever he wants.<\/p>\n

Lew Dickey (who runs Cumulus) doesn’t like Rush and makes no effort to hide that. Cumulus is made up of 4 main chunks – the original was his Atlanta based collection of small and medium market stations he accumulated when the radio consolidation started. None of them were important or influential radio stations.<\/p>\n

Part #2 of the Cumulus empire is the former Susquehanna Radio company call Cumulus Media Company It was acquired by private equity firms with the eye on merging them in with Dickey’s existing publicly traded company and going private. Dickey would manage the stations for a fee, but not own them. CMP did own large influential major market FM music stations, which quickly spiraled ino insolvency under the Cumulus cost cutting management. The deal to take Cumulus private fell apart.<\/p>\n

Part #3 of Cumulus is the original Citadel broadcasting put together by Larry Wilson. It was a similar collection of small town struggling radio stations accumulated after the 1996 consolidation began. He talked a venture capital firm into buying this collection of close to worthless stations for more than the debt he accumulated to buy them and walked away with a net of several hundred million dollars. Citadel hired Mel Karmazin’s bean counter and he immediately alienated all of the station managers in flyover country, since they actually did things like had personal relationships with local business and didn’t chase after Viagra firms and fraudulent investment schemes. Citadel was also run into the ground by a guy who wanted to run stations in New York and couldn’t figure out why small town stations needed employees and sales people – he quickly and sent Citadel teetering close to bankruptcy.<\/p>\n

Disney owned ABC Radio and Paul Harvey was still alive. Disney wanted out of running the ABC radio stations. When they put it up for auction, Cumulus and Citadel were the bidders. Clear Channel and CBS effectively couldn’t bid for them because they already own major market stations that would put them over FCC limits. Citadel “won” – loading up with $2 billion in debt and then winding up in bankruptcy in about a year. Disney still owns a part of Citadel through a complex transaction. The ABC radio stations are still licensed differently reflecting they are separately still collateral indirectly controlled by Disney, kind of.<\/p>\n

After Citadel rushed through bankruptcy and dumped its debt but not its management, debt holders and private equity firms forced a merger between Citadel and Cumulus – Lew Dickey with his small market paper clip hoarding cost cutting mentality promised his backers he could repeat his “success” with the CMP stations, cutting costs while killing the revenue of the stations. He has now gotten around to focusing on cutting costs at the former ABC AM radio stations. Rush is the #1 expense, but there is a contract in place for the remainder of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old thread The anonymous “source” for the Politico story is someone “close to Rush”, but appears connected with WABC and Cumulus. Rush doesn’t work for Cumulus and hasn’t worked from the WABC studio in probably 8 years. Rush owns his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,18,100,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-politics","category-radio-biz","category-rush-limbaugh","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7225"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7228,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225\/revisions\/7228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}