Virtually every topic is on the table for talk radio hosts. That doesn’t mean listeners care about every topic, though. 95.5 WSB host Eric Von Haessler is aware of that fact, but says he has to juggle them.
Von Haessler spent time Wednesday discussing Jimmy Kimmel’s return to host the Oscars in 2024. He then shared, by the drop in ratings for the awards show, it was likely his listeners did not care about the topic.
“Nobody cares. That’s the point. That’s the point,” Von Haessler reiterated. “Your media people can’t understand where you are, America. Let me apologize for them. You don’t care about the Academy Awards anymore. The ratings — as a percentage of the population in 1975 to 2023, 2024 — is an amazing drop off of viewers. But you understand that the media is a 24-hour beast and we have to fill it up. And we’re just like, ‘Hey, it’s Grammy time. It’s Oscar time. We got to do the thing we did before.’ Let me apologize for all of us who say ‘I recognize — we recognize — you don’t give a damn about the Oscars.'”
He continued by noting that faith in institutions has decreased as well, and that means things are different now than they used to be despite the media being slow to adapt.
“People don’t think like that anymore. Everything is so niched out. It’s got us all in our own little world, you know, and looking at our screens. People just don’t care,” Eric Von Haessler said. “People can listen to me go on and on about The Beatles and be like, ‘Okay, you old bastard, shut up’, whatever. They’re listening to whatever they’re listening to. The world isn’t the way that it used to be in the mid-90s, when there was some shared experience.”
