"What I found in the radio division was that they were starved and burning the furniture," Mr Moonves told investors recently.To stop listeners switching to satellite radio and their iPods, Infinity is replenishing its schedules.
"There was a burst of rather difficult foreign news and a lot of listeners who stopped listening said they stopped because of the preponderance of really difficult and distressing foreign news.
But that isn't stopping the listener-supported Columbia University radio station, WKCR (89.9 FM), from celebrating the great jazzman's unofficial centennial with 184 hours of his music.
Jamie Angus said some listeners had stopped tuning in to Today and had told him they could not take any more of "this terrible thing that I can't influence".
"Tariq became a good listener, he stopped wetting his bed and became less violent with his friends and sisters", said Hiba, clearly proud of the changes in her son.
In the opening pages of Borodin's Quartet No. 1 in A, they produced a velvety, unified sound that immediately let listeners stop worrying about whether the performance would be jet-lagged and focus on this peculiar but inviting score.
If, early that year [1787] you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot.
But it was a show waiting to be stolen at any moment, and for this listener it was stopped most definitively early on when the Broadway star Donna Murphy sang "Pirate Jenny" from "The Threepenny Opera" with compelling passion.
WBAI was always running out of money, and one of Josephson's ploys was to threaten now and then to play Kate Smith's "God Bless America" over and over again, non-stop, until listeners had phoned in fifty dollars' worth of pledges.
"A noisemaker's First Amendment right stops when a listener's Eighth Amendment right is impaired," he said.
