I don’t watch his show and I have only heard him on the radio on a couple of cross-country drives, but I am relieved that Glenn Beck is losing his platform on Fox News. As George Zornick at Think Progress says:
Yesterday on his radio show, Beck foreshadowed this announcement by telling his listeners that if he left Fox News, “don’t you ever believe” that the liberal watchdog Media Matters “caused a victory.” Perhaps that’s true — only Glenn himself is to blame for creating a show so radically divorced from reality that even Fox News couldn’t handle it.
Getting rid of Beck doesn’t solve anything and may even make Fox more credible, which would be unfortunate. But I am uncomfortable with Beck having a high-rated show on cable news when nothing he says is true and more than half of it is deranged. Basically, I think it is unhealthy to have any demagogue let loose on the public to misinform and inflame the mentally vulnerable. We don’t need that now.
Beck will still have a big radio audience, but his credibility has taken a hit, and he may never get a big television audience again. I count that as a small step in the right correct direction.
It wasn’t Media Matters. It was the Color of Change advertiser boycott campaign.
He should be sent away with a cardboard soapbox and tiny plastic megaphone just so he knows clearly that his freedom of speech has not be taken away.
Exactly right, Tarheel Dem. Props to Color of Change for their creativity, persistence and effectiveness with the Beck advertiser boycott.
Slightly off topic, but that boycott is one excellent example of progressives organizing against a reactionary target. Obama had nothing to do with the boycott, but he’ll have one less nut lying about him on TV every day, and the other nuts will be that much more cautious about letting their freak flag fly now that they know there could be a cost to their craziness.
Oh please.
Beck served his purpose. He pushed the discourse so far into crazy-town that fools like Paul Ryan are considered to be serious thinkers.
Plus, Beck’s company is still apparently going to be working with News Corp in a production role – which means that he’ll be in a place where advertising boycotts are harder to organize, but he’ll still be able to spread his particular brand of crazy around.
Beck always called himself a rodeo circus clown and it’s true – he was the guy standing out there taking the hits and getting people to focus on him while the rest of the conservative media engine worked around him. By being as extreme as he could be he kept moving that acceptable limit further and further out. At the point where Michelle Bachmann is being somewhat seriously discussed as a Republican Presidential nominee and Paul Ryan’s crazy-ass budget proposal is being discussed as a “good thing” by the so-called “liberal media” I can only imagine that Beck is looking around and congratulating himself on his good work.
nonynony, I don’t disagree that Beck had an impact (though he’s not solely responsible for Paul Ryan and Michelle Bachmann). I do think it’s a victory for progressives that he’ll no longer have a daily television platform to cross-promote himself and his “ideas” (I use the term loosely).
In particular, it’s a victory for Color of Change. They decided to take on Beck at the height of his popularity, knowing that they’d get attacked by the right for doing so. They did it anyway, and did it skillfully enough that over 300 advertisers left Beck’s show. Again, congratulations to them and many thanks.
[In a small and quirky way, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert may deserve some credit too. When their “Restoring Sanity” rally (organized in a matter of weeks) turned out more than twice as many people as Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, it provided a “stubborn fact” of comparison for the Beltway media that Beck’s rallies (flogged endlessly for months on Fox News) just weren’t that impressive.]
“… he kept moving that acceptable limit further and further out.”
Yes, for the Republicans. So now they’re seriously considering nominating people like Michele Bachmann. What a pity that the Tea Party, which was never really very popular anyway, though it certainly made its mark, has been growing less and less popular for nearly a year now.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/tea-party-unpopularity-on-the-rise/2011/03/30/AFlit
S3B_blog.html
They are not coming back. Those days are over. Wisconsin reveals the future of the GOP everywhere except the Deep South and a few other very conservative states like Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma. It won’t happen overnight, but that’s the direction things are going. I don’t mean to sound complacent — indeed the fight is just gearing up and it won’t be easy. But the Republican Party is now about where the American Mercury was just after WW2. From that point it would become more and more fascist, utterly fringe and beyond, finally dying an ignominious and unnoticed death in 1981.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury
So Beck couldn’t even get that right.
I suspect he could get it right if he wanted too. It’s more likely that he didn’t want to give them credit.
i still remember the time he had the guy who wrote the “left behind” series on his show, and they breathlessly discussed how jesus and the 12th Imam were going to duke it out, Godzilla vs Ghidrah-style, and how Ronald Reagan staved off the Apocalypse by calling the USSR “the evil empire”.
By the time I got to work i felt like I’d taken a shitload of acid.
I’ve been assuming his time slot will be filled by Trump
As for radio, Beck was taken off NYC, Philly and 4 stations in CT. He is not doing well in radio. The problem is that stations didn’t sign up for religious stuff and they don’t want it.
His radio numbers are going down.
Oh boohooohoooHOOOOOOOOOOOO! Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!
BAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWW!
Do you suppose the price of gold will fall without him humping Goldline?
Maybe its a good time to sell.
Maybe Beck figured it was time to cash out.
A friend of mine told me to put all my money in gold on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. I should have listened to him. I think I’d have nine times as much net worth as I have currently.
Yeah, I predicted the same for Halliburton, if one only had the stomach for it.