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Stern vs. Leno
Posted: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 11:48 AM
Category: Concerts
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This week’s celebrity fight is between Howard Stern and Jay Leno. These guys have never exactly been pals and have had words in the past but here is the gist of the current debate. IT seems that Jay made some comments back in mid. December about Howards move to Sirius and how he didn’t think it was a smart move on Howard’s part. Jay feels that when Howard used to be on mainstream radio people were talking about him and what he had said that morning on the air, but now that he is at Sirius and has fewer listeners that he really doesn’t hear much anymore. Jay made his original comments to the New York Times and then those comments resurfaced again in a separate article at the end of December in the New York Times again, but this time in the business section, in an article about how Sirius is hurting and having a hard time making a profit.
Stern who has been off for 2 weeks came back to the air and had a few choice words for Jay. First off, Howard shared how happy he was with his move to Sirius and that he knew not all his listeners would be able to make that move and follow him but that his job was to help increase the overall number of listeners on Sirius and basically save the satellite radio business. Stern feels that he has totally accomplished his mission with actually the biggest success ever – having both Sirius and XM merge and he was able to make that happen within just 2 years. Who else but Howard Stern could have increased the listenership form 600,000 to 20 million listeners?? Howard says that Jay has about 5 million viewers but that he has between 5 -6 million listeners which are about 60 % of all satellite listeners. So in terms of throwing around who is relevant and who is not, Howard feels they are both basically as relevant as the other. In addition to that Howard is just so pleased that on satellite he can do the kind of show that he wants to without anyone breathing down his back and monitoring what he is talking about and that was one of his main reasons from moving from “terrestrial radio”.
In more Howard news after being off for 2 weeks for the holiday when the crew came back to work on Monday , Artie Lange was a no show. Although not a complete surprise to his coworkers who have suspected that Artie may have gone back to his bad habits or drugs and drinking. They had no idea where he was until he called into the show and said he had been in intensive rehab. Artie says he will be back on the show Wednesday. The show is always a bit more lively with Artie and his Artie stories.
