Is Glenn Beck fizzling out? It certain seems like the noise we hear is a fizzle and not steam coming out of a teapot. To wit:
One year after hosting a mega rally in Washington, D.C, conservative pundit Glenn Beck gathered supporters near a holy site in Israel Wednesday. The event, which was not without controversy given its location and host, was smaller than some of his past assemblies, but that did not stop Beck from a full display of rhetoric.
“In Israel, there is more courage in one square mile than in all of Europe,” Beck said in his keynote address. The event, titled “Restoring Courage,” was billed as a rally to declare support for the Jewish state.
“Restoring Courage” sounds like a rally to bring back Dan Rather on CBS.
“In Israel,” Beck continued, “there is more courage in one soldier than in the combined and cold hearts of every bureaucrat at the United Nations. No country is perfect. But it tries, and it is courageous. Today, the world needs courage more than ever.”
….Israeli religious and political figures both on the left and right came out against the rally, presumably as a reaction to Beck’s track record of controversial remarks. There was even a Facebook page called “Glenn Beck Stay Home” created in protest.
But in the end, 1,700 supporters showed for the sold-out event, and an additional 3,000 gathered at a nearby viewing station where it was beamed in live, a spokesman for Beck told The Cutline. The Guardian, among others, contested those figures, reporting a “surprising number of empty seats belied the organisers’ claims that demand for tickets had outstripped availability.” Many of the attendees were evangelical Christians from the United States, according to reports.
The Beck spokesman also said there were 100 reporters on hand to cover the rally. Nevertheless, it didn’t manage to spark quite the media frenzy as Beck’s August 2010 “Restoring Honor” rally in the nation’s capital, which reportedly drew some 100,000 people to the National Mall. (A late-summer jaunt to Israel, of course, was probably not realistic for many of Beck’s core supporters in the states.)
To an extent, Beck has fallen off the radar since his departure earlier this summer from Fox News Channel, where he was the 5 p.m. anchor.
Indeed (to use a word MSNBC’s Martin Bashir uses far too much): without a national cable show Beck has to scream louder than before to be heard. He is indeed off at least part of the radar screen — the entertainment radar called television.
Yes, the web is up and coming.
But it is not equal to a Fox show.
All entertainment goes in cycles and, for now at least, Beck seems to be in decline.
If Beck isn’t oh, so yesterday yet, he is oh, so last night.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.