limbaugh has an 8-year, $400-million deal with Clear Channel and over 15 million weekly listeners...
mainstream.
compared to what? not lady gaga singles, chum. other infotainment outlets. here's some data:
Cable TV: Audience
mainstream, ace.
you like to make entirely arbitrary assertions and claim for them the status of a definition. i don't know where this quirk comes from. perhaps you should take a time out and think about it.
as for influence, i don't really know what you're talking about. limbaugh is part of a pretty elaborate conservative media apparatus. that apparatus performs opinion co-ordination functions. your views are almost inevitably informed by that opinion co-ordination mechanism. one of the quirks with conservative opinion co-ordination--which is paradoxically an indicator of its power--is that conservatives all like to see themselves as heroically free-thinking people. and they're all heroically free-thinking in exactly the same way at exactly the same moments.
that must be just a giant consistent coincidence.