RUSH LIMBAUGH IS BACK ON THE AIR, WITH FANS AND FOES ALL EARS

More than five weeks after he entered a residential treatment center for
what he described as an addiction to prescription pain medication, Rush
Limbaugh is to return to the airwaves today.

While his voice will be beamed into an atmosphere swirling with questions
AD not the least of which center on whether he acquired some of those drugs
illegally AD one point seems assured: Mr. Limbaugh, by far the biggest star
in talk radio, is poised to draw one of the biggest audiences in his
15-year career in syndication.

Of those tuning into the program, which will be broadcast live on the East
Coast beginning at noon, the most vocal are likely to be split into two
camps. Some will be loyalists, many of them conservatives, who have
expressed a willingness in recent weeks to forgive Mr. Limbaugh his
transgressions.

Others, however, may be less familiar with his show AD many of them the
"feminazis" and other liberals Mr. Limbaugh says he loves to hate AD who
wonder how he might reconcile his own behavior with his past statements
recommending jail time for drug users.

"I would expect that Limbaugh's listenership will be three to four times
its normal size when he comes on the air," said Michael Harrison, the
editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade journal, which estimates
Mr. Limbaugh's weekly audience at more than 14.5 million. "Personally, he
might be in the worst trench he's ever been in. But people are curious to
hear what Rush's going to say, which puts him, professionally, at the peak
of his career."

Mr. Limbaugh, who is heard on WABC-AM in New York and counts his audience
as closer to million, has done nothing to dampen that anticipation. A
spokesman, Allan Mayer, said on Friday that Mr. Limbaugh was giving no
interviews and would not even say whether he was planning to broadcast from
his studios in Manhattan or those in West Palm Beach, Fla., near where he
has a home.

Before he went silent, Mr. Limbaugh was the subject of news reports in The
National Enquirer and other publications that he had bought drugs like
OxyContin, a powerful painkiller, without a prescription. Other reports
suggested that law enforcement officials were investigating the matter, and
Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that he would not discuss any details
"until this investigation is complete."

Asked what Mr. Limbaugh might say today, Mr. Mayer said: "The only people
he's going to be speaking to publicly are his own listeners, through his
own microphone. They are going to get it from the horse's mouth, as it
were, the first comments he has to make about his own situation and his
view of the world."

In many ways, how people view Mr. Limbaugh's prospects for recovery AD
personally, as well as professionally AD depends on their political
affiliations. Mr. Limbaugh had been a hero of the right, particularly after
he helped galvanize those who seized Congress for the Republicans in 1994.

William J. Bennett, a conservative who served as the so-called drug czar
during the first Bush administration, said in an interview that Mr.
Limbaugh was at the center of "a human drama about a guy who's having huge
success, takes a huge step down, and is now trying to get himself in shape."

That Mr. Limbaugh, with his advocacy of stiff punishment for drug
offenders, would himself admit to a long-term addiction was evocative of
the situation that Mr. Bennett was in earlier this year. One of the
nation's pre-eminent moral crusaders, Mr. Bennett acknowledged that he had
set a poor example by "too much gambling."

Nonetheless, Mr. Bennett sought in the interview to distinguish his own
shortcomings from the conduct of Mr. Limbaugh, a close friend who has dined
at his home, once with Justice Clarence Thomas. "Not an addiction," Mr.
Bennett said of his own actions, as if ticking off a list of talking
points, "not a problem, no therapy, gambling too much, stopped it."

And yet Mr. Bennett said that Mr. Limbaugh deserved to be judged less
severely than former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and perennial
Limbaugh target, who was impeached in 1999 over his deceptions regarding an
affair with a White House intern. "He's not president of the United
States," Mr. Bennett said of Mr. Limbaugh. "He's not blaming his
accusers. He's not lying. He's not lying under oath."

"He was manly," Mr. Bennett added of Mr. Limbaugh. "He was straightforward."

To Phil Friedman, a Democratic strategist who has worked for former Gov.
Mario M. Cuomo, former Mayor Edward I. Koch and Senator Robert C. Byrd of
West Virginia, the circumstances of Mr. Limbaugh's fall may differ from
those of Mr. Clinton's, but the loyalty of his fiercest supporters is a
common thread. Mr. Friedman also saw parallels to the situation of Marion
S. Barry Jr., who was re-elected mayor of Washington in 1994, four years
after investigators caught him in a hotel room smoking crack cocaine.

"When you have a constituency that strong and an audience that devoted,
they will forgive you anything, short of murder," Mr. Friedman said. "I
think the cause is so important to them that they're not willing to
sacrifice a leader because of his personal flaws."

After announcing on Oct. 1 that he was addicted to prescription painkillers
and was checking into a rehabilitation center for 3 days, Mr. Limbaugh was
replaced by a succession of guest hosts, including Tony Snow and Walter
Williams, both political commentators, and Matt Drudge, the creator of the
online Drudge Report (drudgereport.com).

It will be several weeks before Arbitron, the ratings service, compiles the
audience figures during that period. But Mr. Mayer said that surveys of
about 1, listeners each week, conducted for Mr. Limbaugh's producers by
another company, showed that few were defecting. Moreover, the 15
advertisers who buy time on Mr. Limbaugh's nationally syndicated broadcast
have expressed their desire to continue to do so, Mr. Mayer said, and none
of the 6 stations that carry the program have dropped it.

The passion of Mr. Limbaugh's loyal listeners, who refer to themselves as
dittoheads, has been on parade daily on rushlimbaugh.com, his Web site,
which as of yesterday had posted reams of e-mail messages sent by
well-wishers since his departure. All were identified by their first names
and hometowns, as if they were calling in to the show.

They included Akiva from New York, who wrote that Mr. Limbaugh was in the
prayers "of all your fans at my rabbinical seminary."

Mr. Limbaugh has said that he became addicted to painkillers after spinal
surgery in the 199's, an admission that prompted a torrent of similar
testimony. "I made it," wrote Richard of South Lyon, Mich., "you can too!!!"

There is much riding on whether Mr. Limbaugh can beat his addiction,
including a lot of money. His program generates many millions in
advertising revenue, not only for Clear Channel Communications, which owns
the company that syndicates it, but for the stations that broadcast his
program.

Rick Jackson, the general manager of WBT, an AM station in Charlotte, N.C.,
that has carried Mr. Limbaugh for more than a decade, said he expected
today to be "one of the biggest days in our broadcast history" AD maybe
even bigger, he said, than the few hours during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 when
WBT was believed to be the only local station on the air.

"Now who knows what will happen after he returns?" Mr. Jackson said. "A lot
will depend on how he handles it."