One thing I’ve started to wonder about is what particular event is going to cost Glenn Beck his job at Fox News. I’m certain that he’s already on the verge of getting the axe. But, given how bizarre and deranged he’s become, he won’t be fired simply for being bizarre and deranged. He’s offended nearly everyone there is to offend, so I don’t know if being offensive is going to do it, although it might. It’s actually possible that he’ll lose his job by being ridiculous in a way that offends key Republicans. That’s what he’s done with his ravings on Egypt. Opinions differ among conservatives about what’s going on in Egypt. As Steve Benen says:
In the case of U.S. policy towards Egypt, the dynamic is well beyond left vs. right. Instead we’re seeing (a) those in the U.S. who support the protesters, their calls for sweeping democratic reforms, and Mubarak’s ouster; (b) those who support Mubarak and fear his unknown replacement; and (c) those who believe caliphates run by zombie Islamists, the Illuminati, and the Loch Ness Monster are coming to steal your car.
I don’t watch or listen to Glenn Beck, so I don’t know if (c) is literally true, or not. With Beck, who can even tell?
Classic question: Glenn Beck – Truly Loony or Just Playing To His Audience?
I tend to think that Beck is Just Playing To His Audience. He’s hit a gold mine with the suckers who believe right-wing conspiracy nonsense – and those suckers pay out. Directly to him in some cases as well as to shady advertisers for his radio program, which comes back to him. They buy his books, they go to his personal appearances, they buy gold coins at highly inflated prices. He’s tapped a market that even Limbaugh was hesitant to go after and he seems to be doing well with it.
He could of course temper his TV persona, but that would hurt him with his core audience, who would think that he was being compromised by the Islamist-Communist conspiracy. Better to make Fox fire him – and you can bet that once he’s fired he’ll blame it on the Islamists who Fox News has been serving all along!
That actually might be why Fox would be hesitant to get rid of him – he could go nuclear on them and take a chunk of their audience away. They must be hoping that he’ll do something so spectacularly stupid that he enrages the Birchers and mitigates the damage. But if they fired him now he’d be non-stop on his radio show about how Fox News is owned by Islamists who don’t want you to know the Truth – and given that News Corp has a Saudi prince as an investor, there’s more truth behind that attack than Beck normally has for his assertions…
Over the past year, Beck has lost a lot of viewers on Fox. He also lost a lot of advertisers.
His ratings in radio aren’t doing well. He was taken off the NYC market in January.
He’s in the end stage of this. He can’t top what he’s done and he has nowhere to go.
Like many entertainers, Beck has created and experimented with different personas (morning zoo radio dj, Christmas sweater Glenn Beck the curmudgeon, community organizer, confessional 12-step counselor, etc) but this one (ready-to-snap-crazy-professor) is the most successful and has gotten away from him. It’s just too repulsive to play all the time so he is looking (perhaps subconsciously) for a way out. He has painted himself into a corner with it.
What makes his followers think he has any special insights, much less privy to the inner workings of world wide, decades long conspiracies involving the most powerful of people?
(Excuse my armchair psychoanalyzing)
I really don’t think that plays into it at all. The fact is that he feeds their innate fears and insecurities with the very thing that is needed. He validates their deepest and darkest worries. He marshals their tribal instincts in such a manner that they feel a part of something which gives them a sense of relevance and power. A power they need in a world which they have come to believe their parents and grandparents handed them in good faith with the confidence that they, like all the generations before them, would preserve the way of life that has always been. And he reinforces and convinces them every day that there is a hidden and dark force gathering in the night to steal that that away from them. And hand it over to the very antithesis of that idealistic world of their forefathers.
He is a huckster, a charlatan and a master deceiver.
And yet, at the same time, he is a genius. A very sick and dangerous genius.
Booman, people rave about you. I have lurked here, but I never commented. So, I hope no one will pick on me. LOL.
AS to the subject, Glen Beck is dangerous. I am happy to see another commenter say that his numbers have gone down.
I have never watched his show, but I have certain many clips. Freedom of speech is great right–even for a lunatic clown.
Welcome, Dorothy. We’re a fairly civil lot around here so you needn’t hesitate to throw in your 2¢ when you feel like it.
welcome, Dorothy. I’m glad you spoke up.
My pleasure.
Hi Dorothy! Stop by the cafe/lounge for a visit sometime.
Chris Matthews had an interesting segment on Beck this afternoon where he played current clips from a John Bircher leader and overlaid them with Beck’s. It was pretty obvious that Beck is parroting them word for word.
Matthews swears that like McCarthy, Beck is digging himself deeper and deeper into crazy ground and likewise extending his attacks into what should be friendlies like Bill Kristol. Rather than step back, as Kristol is suggesting in his latest column, he is indeed going at this full throttle which is eroding Fox’s bottomline.
The problem is that with McCarthy we had principled persons who would take him on, and who exposed him. Plus at that time there were limits to lying and shamelessness.
Today? What limits are there? Can someone say today “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator…. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” If someone did say that, people would laugh at the naivete of the speaker. Because, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, and the rest of the pack of scum have no sense of decency. In fact, they look, like Karl Rove, for the sense of decency of the opponent, and attack it without mercy.
With McCarthy, we were dealing with government (most importantly as it was for your point military), but with Beck we’re dealing with corporate profit. As long as Beck is worth the investment (i.e., not just profitable, but a more profitable use of capital than, say, a less offensive act), he will remain on the air.
I don’t disagree with you in the least on the principle of it. It’s shameful he is on the air, among other things.
I choose c.
Bill Kristol: Glenn Beck Is ‘Marginalizing Himself’ With Egypt ‘Hysteria’
Now I’m really confused. If Kristol Meth says Glenn Beck is marginalizing himself, does that mean Glenn is actually making himself mainstream?
It would be interesting to see how Fox finesses it. But the event that costs him his job will simply be a conference call with Rush and Roger and the Kochs and whoever else writes the daily talking points for the wurlitzer.
At the same time, I don’t care what “prominent republicans” are telling Joe Klein. Like, you guys get no credit for being anonymously concerned and pretending to file complaints with Roger Ailes. This is just the kind of planted story for political junkies that I loathe.
When I read that Beck was a Welles fanatic, I figured that it was all an act and that, imagining himself a superior person vastly more clever than the herd, so to speak, he actually was purposely telling people. “I’m going to tell them it’s all an act by referencing ‘War of the Worlds’ but they’re all so dumb they won’t get it!” I imagined him saying to himself.
My fantasy may be off–my imagination tends to run away with me–but I think the point is valid. I would add that it doesn’t make sense that a principled right-wing fanatic, someone who really believed this nonsense, would have as a hero one someone as far on the left as Welles very vocally was. I have never met a right-winger who was also a Welles fanatic. Fan of Citizen Kane, maybe, but not a real obsessive.
He seems to me sort of like an alcoholic on a binge, totally out of control. You like Welles, you think about the stuff he cared about, but Beck turns that part of his brain off and just runs after adulation and money. That said, I’m dealing with my own issues and didn’t get to an AA meeting yesterday. Didn’t drink, but didn’t get to a meeting. Gonna make it today, for real.
Iirc, Beck is actually an alcoholic ‘in recovery’ — but there’s such thing as a dry drunk, too. In fact, in my direct experience, most who claim to be in recovery aren’t anywhere near, although they may not be drinking.
So you’ve probably read him right.