There's no way an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read NYT. There might be more listeners than subscribers. But that's hardly an apples to apples comparison, one is free, the other costs money. Many many more people read NYT articles for free without subscribing.
The New York Times covers many things: politics, disasters, science, the arts, education and so on.
Rush Limbaugh exists for one reason only: the promotion of a hyper-partisan view of the world. He gets millions of listeners just for that one single topic.
Well, the NYT has a weekly circulation of about half a million, and Limbaugh gets a weekly audience of 20 million. As to who clicks through a google link to their site? I don't know. I don't think that's anything like "controlling the political narrative" though, and I don't think having a site that people sometimes read is the same as twenty million people listening to you for hours.
The New York Times has at the very least 30% more unique monthly consumers than Limbaugh, and realistically probably 300-400% more given Limbaugh's weekly listener overlap.
* nytimes.com had 72.9 million users and 649.2 million page views in January 2016 [1]
* "Limbaugh still draws some 13 million listeners a week (though that’s down from his 1990s peak of more than 20 million)", per an article from May 2016 [2]
Of course that averages out to 9 page clicks per user, and Alexa estimates that more than 25% of those clicks are Google referrals. Not exactly the same as millions of people listening to your every word.
Indeed, 13-20 million people listening to a voice in the background while driving to lunch is not exactly the same as 73 million people actively mentally engaged while reading an article.
Even notwithstanding his comparatively miniscule and unengaged audience, Limbaugh's agenda-setting power pales in comparison with The New York Times. The combined audience of The New York Times' editorially-aligned media ecosystem utterly dwarfs that of Limbaugh.
Limbaugh influences Hannity, Beck, Levin, and other conservative talk radio; and, to an extent, cable news like Fox and web media like Breitbart.
The New York Times influences a vastly larger media syndicate: the most listened-to radio organization, NPR; print and web media like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic; cable and network news like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. And while there are of course other areas of coverage, politics garners the largest share and most prominent placement. The New York Times' highly syndicated political message not only covers the general population, but also percolates through universities, where engagement with it deepens as it intertwines with the academic curriculum.
The vast reach and depth of the latter media apparatus means that The New York Times plays a major role -- and quite likely constitutes the single most influential voice --
in shaping the dominant narrative in American political life.
