Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke have provided an embarrassment and a revenue sink for his employer, Clear Channel, which has had to contend with increasing numbers of advertisers who have pulled out of advertising on Limbaugh’s show. And as Limbaugh has continued to magnify his own woes, first with an anemic apology about his word choice, and then with an incoherent Twitter campaign against his critics, the signs are clear that Limbaugh’s position as an icon of the right might no longer be secure. In Limbaugh’s self-inflicted wounds lie the opportunity for a conservative rival to emerge—and for a rival network to Clear Channel to scoop up an enormous amount of money.

That rival talker is former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and the rival network is Cumulus Media. “The Mike Huckabee Show” launches on April 9, and Cumulus is eager to sign up radio stations to carry it. The opportunity for them is two-fold: if stations decide to drop Limbaugh, there’s an obvious opening for them to carry Huckabee’s show instead. But even if they don’t, most of the local station contracts with Limbaugh are exclusive: another station in the same market can’t carry him. In the past, that meant the station had snagged itself a prize. In the future, it might look more like they’re saddled with a cigar-smoking albatross.

Cumulus Media’s seized that opportunity, telling stations that don’t have Limbaugh now and that might choose not to reup their contracts to carry him in the future, that in Huckabee, they’ve got a better alternative. The company’s distributed a list of 31 advertisers who have asked that their spots not be affiliated with any Limbaugh-related programming. And they’re pitching Huckabee’s show by telling stations it’ll offer “more conversation, less confrontation.”

In a few weeks, we’ll start to see if that strategy works. And even if it does, Huckabee’s tone may be different from Limbaugh’s, but that doesn’t mean his positions—with a few exceptions like childhood obesity and arts education—will vary much from the man he has a chance to dethrone. But as radio stations reassess their budgets, they might want to reconsider whether Limbaugh’s once-vaunted brand will continue to be worth it to them at the end of the next contract they sign. More than 140 advertisers have already made that assessment and decided to move on.

Earlier this year, This American Life broadcast its most popular episode ever, an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, about labor conditions in Apple’s supply-chain factories. Today, in a letter posted on the website of Chicago Public Media, which produces the show, host Ira Glass announced that TAL was retracting the story, citing numerous fabrications in Daisey’s account, and the breakdown of the program’s fact-checking process which allowed the episode to make it to the air. While there will be numerous debates about what happened at This American Life and the nature of non-fiction writing, there’s another significant question at stake: did Daisey’s report actually do what he’d claimed was his goal and move people to action?

It’s not that the misdeeds of managers at FoxConn were a secret before Daisey’s story aired. Fantastic reporting on the subject has been done prior by Wired, which chronicled a rash of suicides at a factory run by Foxconn, a key member of Apple’s supply chain, and by the New York Times since, chronicling abuses at a number of Apple suppliers. But Daisey’s monologue stirred up a particular debate. A petition inspired by the broadcast attracted 250,000 online signatures in a matter of days; Daisey became a cable news regular, and the story hot talking-head fodder; and as the wave of stories crested, Apple itself invited independent auditors onto its assembly lines and pressured its primary manufacturer to increase wages in response to growing public outrage. For activists who have been trying for years to pressure technology companies into embracing stricter labor standards in much the same way they did the garment industry, this felt like a moment.

But for all of the attention that Apple’s toxic partnership with FoxConn received in the last few months, Apple’s stock climbed above $600 a share this week. Their latest product is expected to break more sales records. And by some measures Apple is now the world’s largest corporation. Consumers may have been moved to sign petitions, but not, apparently, to change their purchasing decisions. Daisey claims he was motivated to fabrication by a desire to speak for vulnerable Chinese workers, and to connect deeply with American listeners. But the effect of his work may not have been as deep as he believed it to be. What we need is honest accounts of what Apple does to the workers it its supply chain. Stories that are true, rather than simply moving, are the only possible starting place for a campaign to hold Apple—and ourselves—truly accountable for the conditions that the company and we as consumers benefit from.

America’s shock radio hosts are not particularly know for their respect for and decent treatment of women. It’s hard to think of a week in American politics where that tendency has been more on display. When Rush Limbaugh gets so disgusting in his smearing of a monogamous woman who’s testifying in support of the administration’s birth control policy that President Obama is moved to intervene, it’s a clear sign—as if we needed yet another one—that we’re harboring something disturbing in our public discourse. So there’s something very odd about the pop culture effort in recent years to rehabilitate shock jocks—or at least to persuade what are clearly America’s ridiculous uptight feminists to get over themselves.

First, there was The Ugly Truth. In that movie, Katherine Heigel is a television producer who’s forced to work with a gross, lowest-common denominator shock jock played by Gerard Butler. He’s the kind of guy who we’re supposed to think is clever because he boosts ratings with jello wrestling, and who, when he spends a dinner torturing Heigel’s character with a pair of vibrating panties (literally), it’s supposed to be hilarious rather than at minimum sexual harassment. But instead of interpreting him as a crass creep, the whole point of The Ugly Truth is that he’s actually a nice guy, who is good to his nephew, brings his coworkers closer together, and is actually what Heigel’s uptight, narrow-minded control freak needs in her life, sexually and otherwise. The reckoning isn’t really about the gap between his public behavior and his private self—it’s Heigel’s character being forced to realize he’s right about everything, and to stop giving him trouble about behavior that is ugly but commercially successful.

Now, we’re going to be forced to go through this all over again in a show that’s not just meant to sell us on the idea that shock jocks are cool but that will also be about trying to get us to like Dane Cook. NBC, in what seems to be proof that the network that gave us Community can go lowest-common-denominator with the worst of them, is going to have Cook play a shock jock who’s paired with a feminist radio host. His character is supposed to be a “disheveled, unshaven, hung-over and purposely detached magnetic grouch who doesn’t like that his co-host is a woman.” The formula’s so obvious it’s painful: Cook will get over his objection to his co-host being a woman because they’ll evolve into a will-they-or-won’t-they pairing. But it’l be the co-host who starts making compromises on her feminism on discovering that Cook’s character has some sort of painful past. In other words, utter nonsense that requires the man involved to accept approximately zero responsibility for being sexist and awful.

But in real life, slut-shaming women in an effort to terrorize them out of speaking publicly, sexually harassing them on the airwaves, and treating them like objects aren’t excusable because your’e a wounded man-child. They’re not acts that have no impact in the world and can be made up for with dinner, or good sex. And feminists of both genders and women in general aren’t the people in this dynamic whose attitudes need to change.