Glenn Beck’s star has been fading for most of the last year. He has lost about half of his television audience. His radio ratings have also been declining leading to stations dropping his program in big markets like New York, Philadelphia, and Madison. His most recent book, “Broke,” was the first in eight years to fail to hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Over 300 advertisers regard him as toxic and will not permit their ads to air during his program.
Yesterday, another milestone was reached. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC drew 39,000 more viewers in the key advertising demographic of 25-54 year olds. Beck did manage to draw more total viewers, but even that statistic is revealing. It shows that Beck’s audience is comprised of only 21% of the young demo. That compares to Maddow’s 31%.
This is further evidence of Beck’s accelerating collapse. Last week it was reported that Beck declined 32% (25-54) and 26% (total viewers) year-to-year for the month of February. And that’s on top of a January year-to-year drop of 50% (25-54) and 40% (total viewers).
The public is obviously tiring of this manic-paranoid’s freak show. As a result, many staunch conservatives are becoming bolder with regard to their criticisms of Beck. And some are even recognizing that Beck may be just the tip of the iceberg and that anyone who hitches their wagon to Beck is equally deserving of ridicule and revulsion. That applies particularly to Beck’s primary benefactors, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, but also to those who work with and/or defend Beck. They will all learn that this stench is unremitting.
As for Maddow, this is just one day, so it will take some time to see if her strength continues. Pessimists will whine that Maddow’s primetime scheduling gives her an advantage, but the fact is that this is the first time she has outdrawn Beck and that makes it significant. For now she deserves to celebrate and I congratulate her.
American may be tiring of Sarah Palin’s whiny brand of self-glorification. Since she ungraciously rebuffed her fellow Alaskans by quitting half way through her term as governor, Palin has been on a non-stop promotional campaign for herself. But even with all of that effort, she is losing ground amongst discerning consumers.
For much of the last decade Fox News has dominated the Nielsen ratings for cable news networks. They spend a great deal of their time on air bragging about it too. In reality they haven’t got that much to boast about. Their audience is relatively larger because they corral conservative viewers on one network while all the other networks divide the broader, more mainstream audience into smaller shares. And even with high numbers for cable news, it needs to be noted that cable news is a far smaller market than that for broadcast news. The lowest rated national broadcast news program (CBS) still gets higher ratings than the highest rated cable news program (O’Reilly).
But these recent events are not aberrations. They are representative of an agenda that cannot be anything but deliberate. Recall Fox’s use of offensive rhetoric with reference to President Obama and his family like “terrorist fist jab” and “Obama’s baby mama.” Then there was the time that Bill O’Reilly tried to explain his reluctance to be critical of the First Lady by saying that he didn’t “want to go on a lynching party.” Or the time he attempted to praise patrons of Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem by noting that they didn’t shout for their “mother-fucking iced teas.” And who could forget Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people? Beck is escalating his racial insensitivity by holding his self-glorifying rally in DC on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech next month.