Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck Fundamentally Transforms Into A Fox News Has-Been

Posted by on April 6, 2011 at 1:01 pm. 13 Comments :

It’s been a long time coming. The indisputably most bizarre festival of conspiratorial dementia ever to be broadcast is nearing its end. That’s right – The Glenn Beck Acute Paranoia Revue will “transition off of” Fox News later this year.


The press release:

FOX NEWS AND MERCURY RADIO ARTS ANNOUNCE NEW AGREEMENT(New York, NY) Fox News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channel as well as content for other platforms including Fox News’ digital properties. Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year.

Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News said, “Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards. I look forward to continuing to work with him. Glenn Beck said: “I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and Fox News. I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership.”

Joel Cheatwood, SVP/Development at Fox News, will be joining Mercury Radio Arts effective April 24, 2011. Part of his role as EVP will be to manage the partnership and serve as a liaison with the Fox News Channel. Roger Ailes said: “Joel is a good friend and one of the most talented and creative executives in the business. Over the past four years I have consistently valued his input and advice and that will not stop as we work with him in his new role.” “Glenn Beck” is consistently the third highest rated program on cable news.

For the 27 months that “Glenn Beck” has aired on Fox News, the program has averaged more than 2.2 million total viewers and 563,000 viewers 25-54 years old, numbers normally associated with shows airing in primetime, not at 5pm. “Glenn Beck” has dominated all of its cable news competitors since launch.

Glenn Beck and Fox News are portraying this as an amicable separation with sloppy wet kisses abounding, but a television network doesn’t hack off a healthy limb for no reason. Nor does an egomaniacal wannabe Messiah abandon a broadcast perch with national reach voluntarily. We may never know the details of this severance, but we can be certain that it was not as lovey-dovey as the parties are pretending.

We know that Beck’s audience has been eroding rapidly. The past quarter showed more than a third of his viewers skipped out. What’s more, when he has been on vacation his numbers barely budged, proving that he was not a particularly indispensable component of his own show. He has the distinction of having driven away more than 300 advertisers who refuse to have their products and services associated with his hostile, hateful rhetoric.

From Fox’s perspective, they could air traffic at a Roach Motel and make more money if just half of the prodigal advertisers return. (Plus, the Roach Motel Hour would provide more intelligent content and attract a smarter audience). Fox may also have an incentive to distance themselves from the more extreme meanderings of Beck’s perverse imagination as the 2012 election cycle ramps up. More and more conservative politicians, pundits, and planners have become fearful that Beck’s derangement is scaring voters away.

Not to worry. Beck was prepared for this. He previously advised his congregation that…

“They can take my job and they can take my wealth but that’s okay…even if the powers to be, right now, succeed in making me poor, drum me out, and I’m just a worthless loser…which I’m just about that much above that now…I will only be stronger for it. I will use American ingenuity and my ingenuity to pull myself up, and I will find another way to get my message out on a platform that will be a thousand times more powerful!”

I always wondered why, if he had a platform that was a thousand times more powerful, why wasn’t he already using it? He never mentioned what it was. I suppose we’ll find out now. Last year, in response to a series of health issues, Beck also assured his disciples that…

“Things are changing and there is no bad news here. Because what I am feeling in myself, and what is happening to my physical body, to some extent, and what is happening to me mentally, is not a depression, is not a death. It is a transformation. It is a transcendence. It is a reaching out of the slime and pulling yourself out. So it is not bad news. It is just a transition period.”

Personally, I think that what is happening is the wrath of God. After all, it is written plainly in Deuteronomy 28:27-29 that if you fail to heed God’s law…

27: The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.
28: The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart.
29: And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

So how is that working out? We hardly need to speak of Egypt and how badly Beck botched that. The emerods (or hemorrhoids) he has already had, and it nearly killed him. The potential blindness he announced tearfully last year. The madness is self evident.

And now the third curse attacking his prosperity is upon him as he is cast into the television ether by the Pharisees of Fox. And he shouldn’t rest too comfortably on his radio career either, as in that realm he has lost seven stations in just the first three months of this year – including major markets like New York and Philadelphia.

Soon the talk will turn to who will succeed Beck. Ironically, I came into possession of a leaked Fox News memo on April 1st that sheds some light on this question. And as for Beck’s future, he hysterically floated the idea of his own cable network. Lookout Oprah. I think he would be far better off exploiting his natural gifts as a combined televangelist/infomercial barker. Imagine the possibilities of merging Beck’s smarmy Jimmy Swaggert impersonation with the marketing zing of a ShamWow prayer cloth pitch.

Fox News should know that jettisoning Beck does not absolve them of responsibility for all the brazen disinformation they have been peddling. He was just an hour long island in a sea of red-faced lies. They still have Bill O’Reily, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Steve Doocy, and a battalion of conniving contributors delivering their propaganda. Fox News will be no closer to legitimate journalism after Beck’s departure. But they will be a little less shrill.

Message To Obama: Don’t You Dare F__king Fire Samantha Power

Posted by on April 2, 2011 at 1:11 pm. 6 Comments :

Once again the evil winds of Fox News are blowing across the land and threatening to whip up a Perfect Storm composed of nothing but disinformation and unfounded fears. As part of their all-to-predictable criticism of President Obama’s efforts to prevent carnage in Libya and to support democratic reformers, the Fox brigades have unleashed a torrent of lies and irrational arguments that amount to siding with Qaddafi against American interests.

As usual, Glenn Beck is leading the charge with his typically factless assault and incitement to panic. The target this time is Samantha Power, the Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights for the National Security Council. Just as he did with Van Jones last year, Beck has begun a barrage of invective aimed at slandering Power. Day after day he repeatedly denounces her while playing a context-deprived video in an endless loop.

The thrust of Beck’s squabbling is his contention that Power is the source of the administration’s policy in Libya. In his pseudo-professorial style Beck mis-educates his gullible viewers as to the roots of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) initiative endorsed by the United Nations. R2P sprung from the post-WWII determination that the community of nations are morally obligated to act in opposition to genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes.

In short, Beck falsely asserts that the UN got the idea from George Soros who got it from Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell.” The only flaw in that theory is that Power’s book (which, by the way, won the Pulitzer Prize) came out the year following the publication of a UN commissioned report on the subject, so it could not possibly have been the inspiration for it. And the UN’s report was based on the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” when Soros was a poor, eighteen year old Holocaust refugee and student in London, and well before Power was even born. Also notable is the fact that R2P was adopted when John Bolton was the ambassador to the UN and both Israel and the Bush administration supported it. These facts, however, don’t prevent Beck from inventing a conspiracy that defies the linear confines of time.

The video Beck has on auto-replay shows an excerpt of Power discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and suggesting that a “mammoth protection force” may be required. Beck alleges that she is promoting this protection on behalf of the Palestinians against the Israelis, and he extends that dimwitted analysis to imply that Power, Soros, and Obama have designs on attacking Israel under the provisions of R2P. In fact, a full playing of the video reveals that Power was not advancing her own solution to the ongoing Middle East hostilities. She was responding to a question that posed a hypothetical scenario wherein one side or the other was engaging in genocide. Her answer proposed a protection force that would be neutral, along the lines of a conventional UN peacekeeping mission.

The reality could not be further from Beck’s gyroscopic spinning of an imagined international military assault on Israel. Beck couples these allegations with a reference to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator, Cass Sunstein, whom Beck calls “the most dangerous man in America.” Sunstein is Power’s husband. Consequently, Beck now calls her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

HypersensitiveThe problem that Beck’s vile disinformation campaign presents, other than advancing the progress of stupidity, is that the Obama administration has been notoriously hypersensitive when it comes to criticism, especially from Fox News. In addition to their knee-jerk reaction to Beck’s demonization of Van Jones, the White House also jettisoned Yosi Sergant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Shirley Sherrod from the Department of Agriculture, over phony controversies promoted by Fox and other right-wing media.

This Foxophobia manifests itself in dangerously careless decision making that not only unfairly punishes staffers who did nothing wrong, it encourages the Becks of the world to persist with their character assassination crusades.

In this regard it is imperative that Obama not buckle under to the smears that Samantha Power is now suffering. The President needs to demonstrate that he has the fortitude to ignore Beck and Fox and the rest of the conservative hate machine that is itching to claim another scalp. Power is a brilliant, dedicated, and effective public servant and deserves the support of the President. She must not become another casualty in the war on competent White House advisors (which is really just a war on the White House by proxy).

My message to Obama is this: You cannot placate your foes by giving in to them. They feed off of that sort of weakness and become even more voracious. By denying them their little victories you retain trusted advisors, enhance your reputation, and starve the beast that stalks you. So, Mr. President, don’t make the same mistakes you made with Van Jones and the others. Stand by Power. Scoff at Beck. And exhibit some of the backbone that your position imparts onto you.

LEAKED MEMO: Fox News Considers Glenn Beck’s Replacements

Posted by on April 1, 2011 at 10:49 am. 15 Comments :

[UPDATE 4/6/11:] Just a few days after this startling April 1st revelation was published, Glenn Beck and Fox News announced that Beck’s program will end later this year.

[BREAKING: April 1, 2011, New York, NY]
In recent weeks there has been growing speculation as to the future of Glenn Beck on Fox News. Several events seem to be foretelling an imminent severance between Fox and their resident End Times correspondent. For instance:

1) Beck’s ratings are in an unrelenting freefall. The latest quarterly numbers reveal that, compared to just one year ago, Beck has lost 30% of his total audience, and amongst viewers between the ages of 25-54 he’s dropped 37%. He was even bested by Rachel Maddow a couple of weeks ago.

2) David Carr of the New York Times reported that Fox insiders have begun “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.”

3) Joel Cheatwood, Fox’s dedicated executive nursemaid for Beck, is leaving Fox to join Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts – a sign that the network no longer requires a minder for Beck.

4) When Beck was on vacation last month, Fox Business host Andrew Napolitano filled in for him and the ratings barely budged – a signal that Fox could replace Beck at any time without suffering any ill effects.

5) Growing numbers of conservatives are repudiating Beck’s increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories.

6) Seven radio stations have dropped Beck’s show this year (so far). This corroborates the weakness seen in his television ratings.

Apparently these facts are being taken very seriously in the Fox News executive suites. News Corpse has exclusively acquired a confidential memo that cryptically discusses the “WK Day 5pm” time period and lists potential hosts that are under consideration.


The document identifies ten notoriously conservative “candidates” that could conceivably fill Beck’s shoes. The list is duplicated below along with a brief appraisal of the candidate’s pros and cons.

  • Ann Coulter
    • Pro: Has her own wardrobe of short, black cocktail dresses.
    • Con: Thinks she still looks good in short, black cocktail dresses.
  • Steve Doocy
    • Pro: Connects with the common man.
    • Con: Connects even better with CroMagnon Man.
  • Michele Bachmann
    • Pro: Appeals to Tea Party movement.
    • Con: Could send Sarah Palin into a jealous rampage.
  • Andrew Breitbart
    • Pro: Known for biting commentary.
    • Con: Known for biting the heads off rats.
  • Ted Nugent
    • Pro: Might attract a younger demographic.
    • Con: Might shoot random crew members for meat.
  • Victoria Jackson
    • Pro: Has wide recognition from being a Saturday Night Live comic in the late eighties.
    • Con: Hasn’t actually made anyone laugh since.
  • Alex Jones
    • Pro: Would continue program’s emphasis on government corruption.
    • Con: Believes Rupert Murdoch is complicit with government corruption.
  • Christine O’Donnell
    • Pro: Youthful good looks could turn advertising slump around.
    • Con: Could turn staff into ferrets if angered.
  • Rush Limbaugh
    • Pro: Has a massive audience and a message made for television.
    • Con: Has a massive ass and a face made for radio.
  • Jon Voight
    • Pro: Prestige of having an Oscar nominee on the schedule.
    • Con: May be better to go with someone more coherent like Gary Busey.

This memo is the strongest evidence yet that Beck’s days are numbered. His contract expires at the end of the year, but there’s even money that he doesn’t even last that long. Perhaps this is what Beck is referring to when he warns of the Coming Insurrection. It isn’t so much a Perfect Storm that is threatening to engulf the world – just Beck’s world.

A Sign From God? Glenn Beck’s Cursed Ratings

Posted by on March 30, 2011 at 2:42 am. 2 Comments :

Listen up brothers and sisters, for the Word of God is nigh and sinners must repent with all haste. The End Times prophesied in the Good Book are upon us and there is no time to delay if you desire salvation.


Take for instance the wayward soul we know as Glenn Beck. With three months of the year expired and thrice a ratings calamity. The latest quarterly book of numbers reveal that, compared to just one year ago, Beck has lost 37% of his most valuable audience, those between the advertiser-blessed ages of 25-54. And the loss amongst the whole of the viewership is 30%. He was even defeated by the dreaded Maddow twelve days past.

The signs are clear and cannot be ignored. God is pissed! He has said so unambiguously. Deuteronomy 28:27-29, describes the punishment from the Lord if you should fail to follow his laws:

27: The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.
28: The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart.
29: And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

We hardly need to speak of Egypt and how badly Beck botched that. The emerods (or hemorrhoids) he has already had, and it nearly killed him. The potential blindness he announced tearfully last year. The madness is self evident.

And now the third curse attacking his prosperity is upon him. And this only days after whispers that his program might be cast into the television ether by the Pharisees of Fox. His audience is fleeing, as are his sponsors. And five radio stations denied him just since the new year.

Let us all pray that Beck has his affairs in order – and I don’t mean the ones with interns and altar boys. These are surely the End of Days and for Beck the seasons are coming to a close. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but we knew that when S/He created Beck in the first place.

Who Says Glenn Beck Isn’t Funny?

Posted by on March 25, 2011 at 3:38 pm. 2 Comments :

Glenn BeckOn his TV program yesterday, Glenn Beck launched into a hilarious routine that simply has to be shared with the world. It concerned his paranoid perception that an army of George Soros soldiers are advancing on him and his motley crew.

Beck: And please, enough, George Soros. He’s got 86 people now on staff at Media Matters. Eighty-six! And the CEO of Media Matters said, “Oh, we need to hire some more.” He was fundraising. “We need to hire some more because it takes a lot of people to correct Glenn Beck’s nonsense.” There are ten people. Ten that work on this program. Ten that put it together. TEN! It takes 86 to try to tear us down.

That’s hilarious. I could hardly…oh wait. He was serious. Beck actually thinks that every employee at Media Matters is assigned to watching and fact-checking his program. That includes the accountants and receptionists. And who does that leave to monitor Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly and, well, everybody else at Fox? Not to mention Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Andrew Breitbart and everybody at every other television or radio station, or newspaper or Internet site.

Nope. Beck believes that all of Media Matters is wholly dedicated to bringing him, and only him, to ruin, and that George Soros is personally staked out in front of a wall of TVs directing the effort.

I don’t know how many people are actually monitoring Beck’s program, but I can safely assume that it takes at least a few focused researchers to run down the actual facts associated with his wild proclamations, because I do it myself with some frequency.

The advantage Beck has over those of us who rely on facts is that it takes considerable time and effort to confirm or negate information with documentary evidence of your conclusions. However, all it takes is a good imagination if you’re going to make stuff up.

For instance, it takes only a few seconds for me to claim that Beck once hired Monica Lewinsky as an intern on his old Morning Zoo radio show, and that the show’s producer admitted that they sent Lewinsky to Washington as a prank. It would take a legitimate researcher much longer to look into this assertion, acquire documents, compare dates, seek statements from witnesses, etc.

That’s why it only takes ten people to put together Beck’s show. They really don’t have much to do other than keeping the blackboard clean. And they aren’t distracted with pesky little concerns about honesty or proof. In fact, ten people seems a little high to produce the garbage that Beck puts on the air every day. I could probably do myself with an intern and a box of chalk.

Fox News And Glenn Beck: Pro Genocide?

Posted by on March 25, 2011 at 1:48 am. 8 Comments :

The latest demonstration of right-wing dementia is actually just a variation on an old theme: Whatever Obama does, they’re against it. In this instance they are coupling that with a perennial conservative favorite: Whatever it is, George Soros is behind it.

From the moment the crisis in Libya began there was an outcry from rightists that the President should intervene on behalf of the rebellious citizens whom Qaddafi was slaughtering. That is until the President did just that, at which point they were outraged by his reckless imperialism.

Now the attacks on the administration are escalating to accuse Obama of conspiring with a shadowy organization that they allege is tied to terrorists and aspires to invade Israel. The organization is the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. This ghastly, UN-backed backed group lists barbarians like former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Bishop Desmond Tutu amongst their patrons. Their mission is to enlist the international community’s cooperation to prevent genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. What a dastardly plot!

Glenn Beck took up this argument this morning on his radio program. He was alerted to it by a caller and could barely contain his glee. For him it was another piece of the conspiratorial stew that mashed together many of his favorite demons including Soros, Muslims, and Cass Sunstein whom he calls “the most dangerous man in America.”. And somehow by becoming even more conspiratorial he insisted that this puts an end to criticism of him as a conspiracy theorist. Apparently the conspiracy theory that he is a conspiracy theorist is a conspiracy theory itself. And least that’s Beck’s theory.

It’s clear, however, that Beck’s caller got his information from either WorldNetDaily, who published an item claiming to have found “Soros’ Fingerprints on Libya Bombing,” or from one of their many conservative repeaters, including Fox Nation. The WND article was written by notorious Birther Aaron Klein and declared that…

“Philanthropist billionaire George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the global organization that promotes the military doctrine used by the Obama administration to justify the recent airstrikes targeting the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.”

Klein is a long-time Obama basher who wrote a book titled, “The Manchurian President,” that questioned Obama’s citizenship and patriotism. He has been working tirelessly to taint the President’s policy toward Libya. Just two days ago he posted an article on WND that asked…

“Could President Obama’s decision to sidestep Congress and strike Libya as part of an international coalition put the U.S. on a military collision course with Israel?”

There’s that Israel invasion thing again. You have to wonder whether these guys actually believe what they are spewing or are they just so infected with Obama Derangement Syndrome that they’ve lost the ability to process coherent thoughts?

The policy they are so feverishly flagellating is known as “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). It was adapted from the 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which was a response to the atrocities witnessed during the Holocaust. There was worldwide condemnation of genocide and war crimes, and agreement that it must never be permitted to happen again – even if that meant using force to defend civilians being victimized by their own government. In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published a report that refined the policy and it was formally adopted by the UN in 2005.

That’s the policy cited by the right as justification for restraining Qaddafi. And that’s the policy that Fox News and Glenn Beck are opposing. By extension, it must be concluded that they are in favor of ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity that the policy prohibits. Beck even conceded that the mission of R2P sounded good until he discovered its wicked roots. He began by expanding on the U.S. plot to invade Israel on his television show today. Not surprisingly he got everything wrong. He attributed the policy to a National Security aide, explicitly asserting that it “came from Samantha Power,” not the UN.

No it didn’t. It came from the UN commissioned ICISS report while John Bolton was ambassador, and it was supported by conservatives in the Bush administration including Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Beck asserted that the UN got the idea from Soros who got it from Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell.” The only problem with that theory is that Power’s book (which, by the way, won the Pulitzer Prize) came out the year following the publication of the ICISS report so could not possibly have been the inspiration for it. Typical Beckian disinformation that can’t even make the ends meet. But that doesn’t stop him from filling his gullible disciples weakened brains with hogwash.

Now Beck and the right is closing ranks to attack this humane policy that is illustrated by sentiments like this:

“True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments. If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified.”

While that sounds like it could have been uttered by anyone from Reagan to Clinton, or even to Beck, that quote was in fact from (you Tea Baggers may want to sit down), George Soros. It epitomizes the Open Society philosophy of people-powered democracy that Beck distorts as being a version of a New World Order.

I find it more and more depressing that there are people who actually buy into the fiction that Beck and Fox News promote. Granted those numbers are in decline, but it’s still a concern. It is the most delusional faction that still adheres to these lies and they can be a dangerous lot. That’s why it remains so important to continue to counter the disinformation with the truth. At least it may be possible to mitigate the damage they do.

Glenn Beck Has A Bright Future – In Infomercials

Posted by on March 23, 2011 at 9:34 am. 2 Comments :

With his ratings in a steep downward spiral and advertisers rushing for the exits, the speculation surrounding Glenn Beck’s future at Fox News is reaching a fever pitch.

A few weeks ago David Carr of the New York Times reported that Fox insiders have begun “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.” More recently reports say that Joel Cheatwood, Fox’s dedicated executive nursemaid for Beck, is leaving Fox to join Beck’s production company Mercury Radio Arts. That’s perhaps the strongest indicator that the Beck program has no future at Fox. And now Brian Stelter of the New York Times says that Beck is considering launching his own cable channel.

Beck has called President Obama a racist. He has lectured on the socialist artwork hidden in Manhattan landmarks. He believes that radical Muslims are conspiring with American progressives and Google executives to reinstate a global Islamic caliphate. He has predicted Armageddon too many times to track. But now we finally have irrefutable confirmation that Glenn Beck is certifiably insane.

Where would Beck get the idea that he could anchor such a network? Not only is his popularity in freefall, but even at its height it wasn’t enough to support such a venture. For comparison consider Oprah Winfrey who recently launched a cable channel of her own. Oprah has an international fan base that dwarfs Beck’s. Her audience is much more advertiser-friendly. She has been a beloved American icon for decades. The notion that Beck could pull this off with a couple of million mostly geriatric Tea Baggers who would have troubling finding his new channel is ludicrous.

Pope Glenn BeckWhat sort of cable network would Beck produce? He certainly couldn’t persuade anyone that he could run a news network. So would he settle for an entertainment net with reruns of Touched By An Angel supplementing his daily sermons?

A far better option for Beck would be to embrace his inner televangelist. He has been preaching his demented gospel for some time now and wouldn’t have to change much from his current program. He could acquire a struggling religious cablecaster and install himself as Pope.

Another option would be an infomercial channel where his experience as a huckster would come in handy. And the advertisers that he has managed to hang on to are just the sort that would benefit from this style of programming. Gold coins, survivalist gear, and various medical and insurance products would be easy to peddle to his gullible disciples along side limited edition Tea Party serving sets and commemorative plates depicting America’s Apocalypse.

Ideally, he could combine the two to form the first ever “evange-mercial” channel. Imagine the possibilities of merging Beck’s smarmy Jimmy Swaggert impersonation with the marketing zing of a ShamWow prayer cloth. It’s a natural for Beck and we at News Corpse can’t wait to see him peddling the Lord’s swag on late night TV.

Why Does Fox News Keep Glenn Beck Around?

Posted by on March 16, 2011 at 10:43 am. 10 Comments :

In a discussion on the fairness and balance of Fox News, the network’s CEO Roger Ailes famously told Barbara Walters that, “I’m not in politics. I’m in ratings. We’re winning.”

If we are to take Ailes at his word, then we have to wonder why he keeps Glenn Beck on the schedule. The program has been shedding viewers like a mongrel with a scalp condition for months. His year-to-year numbers dropped 40% in January and another 32% in February. He is sinking faster than any other program on cable news. A couple of weeks ago Rachel Maddow drew more viewers than Beck for the the first time ever. Over 300 companies have declined to advertise on his program due to offensive content like his anti-Semitic rants against George Soros and his bloodthirsty allusions to having to “shoot them [radicals] in the head.”

Last week Beck was on vacation and Fox Business host Andrew Napolitano filled in for him. The result was the ratings barely budged. And on Tuesday Rachel again drew more viewers than Beck’s program with its guest host. This is fairly conclusive evidence that the audience for that time period is constant regardless of who is on the air. Consequently, Fox could replace Beck at any time (as some speculation suggests is under consideration) without suffering any ill effects in the ratings.

So why don’t they? They could certainly fill that hour with another conservative mouthpiece that would cost them far less to employ. They could make much more money by recovering the A-List advertisers who have previously abandoned the program. And they would not have to endure the embarrassment of being associated with Beck’s delusional conspiracy theories that are lately drawing criticism from even the most stalwart advocates of conservatism.

The only reason that a so-called “news” network would continue to employ someone whose analyses and assertions are so distant from any sane definition of journalism, and so reviled by more rational observers, is because the network approves of, and agrees with, his inane proclamations of doom and his determination to transform political discourse into a feast of demonization and personal destruction.


The lesson from Beck’s absence last week is profound. If after learning that their ratings would remain constant in a post-Beck world, Fox News elects to keep him in the lineup anyway, we must conclude that Ailes and his boss Rupert Murdoch, are on board Beck’s crazy train. That’s the answer to the question in the headline. Ailes and Murdoch cannot disassociate themselves from the Beck Doctrine. They obviously regard Beck’s contribution to their mission as more important than either money or respect. So the next question is: What the hell is their mission?

James O’Keefe’s NPR Sting Debunked By Glenn Beck Site

Posted by on March 12, 2011 at 9:32 am. 17 Comments :

It should come as no surprise that James O’Keefe is an unethical liar who produces deliberately deceptive videos to smear his political opponents. That’s been proven on many occasions. What’s surprising is that now even Glenn Beck’s web site, The Blaze, is confirming this after having analyzed O’Keefe’s latest videos attacking National Public Radio.

James O'KeefeScott Baker, Editor-in-Chief of The Blaze, published a fairly in-depth review of O’Keefe’s scam wherein he compared segments of the edited version to the original unedited source material. What he found he described in his conclusion as “editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented.” Here are some of the overt misrepresentations O’Keefe manufactured:

1) O’Keefe’s edited video portrayed NPR’s Ron Schiller as happily willing to take a donation from a Muslim Brotherhood front group. The long-form video downplays the connection to the Brotherhood, and discusses its current status as a moderate, non-violent organization.

2) The edited video portrayed Schiller reacting approvingly in a discussion of Sharia law. The long-form video shows that the response was actually to a different subject entirely. It was just edited in to make it appear as if he was responding the discussion of Sharia law.

3) The edited video portrayed Schiller as hostile to Republicans and conservatives. The long-form video shows him praising the GOP. Those remarks were completely cut out.

4) The edited video portrayed Schiller disparaging the Tea Party as racist. The long-form video shows that those remarks were actually the views of others that was describing.

5) The edited video portrayed Schiller demeaning the intelligence of conservatives. The long-form video shows both him and his NPR colleague defending the intellect of conservatives and even Fox News viewers.

6) The edited video portrayed Schiller asserting that federal funding for NPR was not necessary or desirable. The long-form video shows him going into detail about the necessity of those funds.

When Glenn Beck’s web site calls out a conservative for being unethical, there must be something seriously wrong. His lies must have been so egregious that they surpass the threshold for lying ordinarily maintained by people like Beck. Part of me worries that this whole critique of O’Keefe is a prank and that tomorrow The Blaze will reveal that they were just kidding to see if liberals like me would pick up the story. But for the time being it appears to be a legitimate thrashing of a corrupt propagandist.

Granted, The Blaze is not nearly as judgmental as I am, and much of their criticism was couched as questions, i.e. the article’s headline: Does Raw Video of NPR Exposé Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics? Yes, it does! But they seem loathe to come right out and censure their ideological ally. Nevertheless, this damning analysis is a significant departure for a Beck enterprise. Perhaps there has been some influence from The Blaze’s new boss, Betsy Morgan, who once ran the Huffington Post.

The examples above are representative of the grossly deceptive practices that James O’Keefe, a convicted criminal, engages in repeatedly. They are further evidence that nothing he does or says deserves to be taken seriously.

This also demonstrates the crippling naivete of NPR for reacting so hastily in compelling the resignation of NPR chief Vivian Schiller. Have these people learned nothing from the Shirley Sherrod affair when an innocent person’s reputation was dragged through the mud based on fraudulently edited video? And are they oblivious to the very real harm they do by empowering jerkwads like O’Keefe?

The only attention that O’Keefe and his ilk should get when they release a video or publish a story is from the Weekly World News or Comedy Central. Responsible journalists should avoid these obvious fabrications like the plague. Why anyone in the media would afford this known liar any respect given his propensity for bastardizing the truth is beyond me. They only embarrass themselves by doing so.

And that goes for the targets of these phony stings as well. People on the left need to have much greater resolve to defend their associates and their principles in the face of vile and dishonest attacks from the right. Otherwise we are handing them unwarranted influence over the debate and cutting ourselves off at the knees. That has to stop NOW!

The Haunting: Glenn Beck Sees George Soros In Every Shadow

Posted by on March 7, 2011 at 6:47 pm. 5 Comments :

How does Glenn Beck sleep at night when he knows that his dreams will be invaded by the Puppet Master himself, George Soros. Beck seems to be obsessively fixated on the imaginary threat that Soros is persecuting him at all times.

The latest episode of Beck’s dementia concerns a story last month from the Jewish Internet magazine, Tablet. Liel Leibovitz discovered that Premiere Radio Networks, the radio syndicator of top names like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, offers a service that provides actors to portray callers for their radio program clients.

Many of my liberal peers jumped on the story, accusing the right-wing broadcasters of faking calls to their shows. I laid off because, while the Premiere-On-Call service does exactly that, there was no allegation that any specific host was utilizing the service.

Nevertheless, Glenn Beck’s web site, The Blaze, has responded with typical paranoid bombast. They posted what they think is a shocking expose titled: Uncovered: Another Soros-Funded Attack On Glenn Beck and Talk Radio. The posting begins by attributing the Leibovitz story to the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) who merely posted a link to the original article on the Tablet’s web site. But that was enough to imply a Soros connection. CJR receives some funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The problem is, CJR did not write the article, nor did they implicate Beck or anyone else as using the phony phone callers. In fact, the original column in the Tablet didn’t implicate anyone either. But that didn’t stop The Blaze from making a wholly unsupported accusation that Lelbovitz mislead his readers. The Blaze criticized Leibovitz for writing about…

“…how stations around the country are using actors to augment their programs but nowhere in the article does he offer legitimate proof or any reasonable semblance of proof that Beck, Hannity, or Limbaugh ever made use of the service.”

That’s true. No one disputes that Premiere was providing actors to stations to augment their programs. And it’s true that Leibovitz offered no proof as to Beck, et al, using the service – because he never made that allegation. Reporters often decline to provide proof of things that were never a part of what they were writing. You may have noticed that I haven’t offered any proof in this article that Sarah Palin is Charlie Sheen’s meth connection.

The Blaze goes on to inquire as to why Leibovitz mentioned only Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck in his article, and then responds saying “The answer to the question is simple, George Soros.” Of course. Soros is the answer to every question in the Beck universe. It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that they are the three biggest talkers on Premiere’s roster, and in the nation as a whole.

Finally, The Blaze leaps entirely out of the reality-based world to assert that Leibovitz is “connected to the Columbia Journalism Review” and is a contributor. I cannot figure out how they came to that conclusion. There is no reference to Leibovitz on the CJR web site, and there are no articles attributed to him. None. But without tying Leibovitz to CJR they could not tie him to Soros. So they had to invent the connection in order to advance their conspiracy.

This is how obsessed Beck is with manufacturing controversies that affirm his fear that George Soros is pulling the strings behind every devious, anti-American endeavor that creeps into his diseased brain. And, of course, that includes the assaults aimed directly at Beck. Because in the end that’s all that really matters. The entire structure of western civilization is propped up on Beck’s shoulders, and the only thing that prevents it all from crashing down is Beck standing guard against the defiler, Soros. That puts Beck’s life at risk every day, and every night as well. Even in his haunted dreams, Soros is lurking, waiting to strike. Don’t go to sleep, Glenn. That’s how he’ll get you.