The big media news of the day continues to be that Fox News is ending its revival of “Looney Tunes”: Glenn Beck’s TV show will finally…mercifully..be going of the air.
For those who ever questioned whether there is a God in heaven, here’s your proof.
Glenn Beck — the self-proclaimed “Paul Revere” of America’s talk show political culture — and Fox issued the perfunctory announcement cuddly schmuddly statements saying such nice and respectful things about each other and pledging to do other non-daily-show projects in the future. But that usually turns out to be as accurate as when newspapers folded their evening newspapers as a merger and announced the two papers would combine and be better than ever. It really meant that a corporation killed a newspaper, combined staffs and was going to downsize so there was most definitely ONE paper.
In reality, Beck is leaving Fox to spend more time with his black helicopters. Or sell more gold.
But what this IS NOT is Beck simply deciding things have gone so swimmingly well that he’s moving on to do more at Fox. Or Fox deciding that he’s such a terrific earner and has enhanced their brand so much they want to have him do high profile specials so he can continue earning what he has been earning them and continue influencing how he has helped them in their quest to enhance how their brand is perceived.
It’s a case of Beck’s inflammatory, sometimes racist and sometimes bigoted statements and end-of-the-world narrative having chased advertisers away and hampered Fox’s efforts to get credit for some of its fine straight field reporting by serious journalists — the kind not done by Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly and not given sufficient credit by the network’s many critics.
The real significance is that Beck’s exit shows that there are indeed boundaries that can be crossed:
Although birtherism is being widely accepted now by many Republicans — look at how Donald Trump’s polling has skyrocketed since he took up the “issue” — Beck’s world view still has not.
But Beck had influence, indeed.
When people watch or listen to any highly rated talk show host the host is like their good friend. People will trust and accept what a talk show host says, even its inaccurate. In the 1980s and 1990s the “Flush Rush Quarterly” was devoted solely to documenting the many inaccuracies asserted by mega-talk-show-host Rush Limbaugh. But Limbaugh’s listeners didn’t care about that nor do his listeners and Internet defenders care today. They would either say the new info about Rush statements was a lie, or a distortion, or just ignore it since it didn’t fit in with what they already believed — and Rush tells them things fitting in with what they already believe.
The danger for conservatives was always that Beck could start slowly shifting the debate towards his world view — shift it from assertive partisanship into areas where any minute you expected to hear THIS theme. And any future incident involving violence linked to his comments could damage conservatives.
Beck took it right up to the edge. But in the end Fox News had had enough. It was highly notable when Fox News boss Roger Ailes told the Associated Press yesterday:
“Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled,” Ailes said. “The other half say he quit. We’re pretty happy with both of them.”
That’s about as pointed as you could get. AND:
He also seemed to imply that Beck’s show might have been getting a little tired.
“We felt Glenn brought additional information, a unique perspective, a certain amount of passion and insight to the channel and he did,” Ailes said. “But that story of what’s going on and why America is in trouble today, I think he told that story as well as could be told. Whether you can just keep telling that story or not … we’re not so sure.”
Beck had problems: not only were advertisers who wanted to sell products that weren’t straight jackets avoiding Beck due to the bad publicity and an unrelenting boycott Beck campaign, but many politicos and media types wanted no part of his show.
Scott Baker and others have written about whether or not Beck was similar to Father Coughlin, the fiery talk maven of the 30s who eventually left the air and vanished to be later called the “father of hate radio.” GOPer David Frum wrote of Beck’s message and Fox News:
It’s not a new message of course. In fact, big parts of it seem almost self-consciously copied from Peter Finch’s legendary declamation in the movie Network.
Of course, Finch was only pretending to be crazy. He was an actor performing a role. Then again – so probably is Glenn Beck.
But what about Fox News? What’s their excuse?
Beck certainly has his fanatical fans (I have friends and relatives who adore him). But he also apalls liberals and moderates and is a subject of derision among many serious conservatives. To wit:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
But in the end? Fox and Beck didn’t like each other. Not a good fit. The New York Times:
The negotiations that led Glenn Beck to announce his departure from the Fox News Channel on Wednesday ended with an expression of “let’s part as friends,” according to several people with knowledge of the talks. But behind that moment was a torrent of acrimony that underscored just how fractious the relationship between Mr. Beck and the network had become during his three-year run on Fox.
Mr. Beck’s official departure was preceded by conversations over a period of months with the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes. Even as Mr. Beck and Mr. Ailes described how much they liked each other in an interview with The Associated Press, the message conveyed between the lines by both sides was that, despite ratings that would normally bring about an automatic contract renewal, this was a relationship that had grown cold — and run its course.
AND:
Notably, Mr. Beck became a daily broadcast platform for a libertarian strain of politics that is also evident in the Tea Party, a movement he embraced. Critics loudly condemned him for living with his own facts — but that only seemed to widen the conspiracy that he outlined each night, aided by a growing number of chalkboards in his studio.
But at that studio, he was unhappy from almost his first day on the job, which happened to be the day before Mr. Obama was inaugurated. Even in his first year, he was contemplating an exit from Fox and wondering if he could start his own channel.
Beck supporters presented a picture of constant sniping, planted stories about his declining ratings, and discomfort with his ability to build a career for himself outside the Fox News brand.
From Fox’s perspective, the facts about Mr. Beck’s run on the network have been public and indisputable. Among those were the refusal of hundreds of Fox advertisers to allow their commercials to be placed on Mr. Beck’s program, and a history of incendiary comments that attracted harsh backlash, including one where the host called President Obama a racist and another where he compared Reform Judaism to radical Islam. (He later apologized for both comments.)
Mr. Ailes suggested in the interview Wednesday that he was happy with the departure being characterized as either a cancellation or a decision by Mr. Beck to quit. Fox has retained all its other high-rated hosts in the past, but they didn’t come under the intense scrutiny that Mr. Beck has faced, nor the mass opposition from advertisers.
As onerous as that might have been to Fox financially, it did not seem to be an issue for Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation. …….But the ratings clearly could not overcome the fractures in the relationship. “By the end both sides had had enough,” said one executive who was involved in the decision to end the deal.
Joanna Molloy, writing in the New York Daily News:
Good riddance, crowed anybody even slightly left of John Birch Wednesday at the news that Glenn Beck had lost his nightly Fox TV show.
Officially, Beck “intends to transition off of his daily program,” both the blowhard and his bosses at Fox said Wednesday.
But the writing was on his chalkboard: The ratings were down – he was pulling in 2.7 million last year at this time, and that number is down below 2 million.
Young viewers were bolting.
And advertising drying up.
In effect, the tea party is over.
About the only folks who are really going to miss the blubbering Beck are the ones who made fun of him. Beck has been the gift that kept on giving for the nation’s satirists and funnymen.
One of the ones who’ll miss him most is Jon Stewart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JnDY2Gv5YQ
What’s a fitting sign off for Glenn Beck’s daily show?
How about this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlvFpf56vU
HERE’S A CROSS SECTION OF OTHER OPINION ON GLENN BECK:
–The Daily Beast’s John Avlon, who covered Beck in his highly popular and required reading “Wingnuts” book, has a post that MUST be read in full. Here are some key parts of it:
The nightly nervous breakdown will not be televised.
Glenn Beck is going off the air on Fox News.
It is a remarkable reversal of fortune for a man who one year ago was banking $32 million annually, teaching Americans how to fear-monger for fun and profit.
But with his ratings down nearly 50 percent and advertisers abandoning the show, Beck’s apocalyptic shtick has been getting rancid fast.
It’s almost hard to remember that not so long ago Glenn Beck was being taken seriously as a political figure by hyper-partisans on the far right. The proto-Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill in 2009 was directly inspired by Beck. This past summer, he filled one-third of the Washington mall with his faithful for what turned out to be a religious revival with political overtones, on the anniversary of the Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. There were even, it is now surreal to say, calls for him to run for president on a ticket with Sarah Palin—a draft movement that they had to deny.
A low-lights reel of Beck’s worst moments on Fox would take hours to watch, but it would offer a useful seminar on the politics of incitement and near-mainstreaming of conspiracy theories in the Obama era…
He extensively details Beck’s rise, fall, influence and style, then writes of watching Beck last night. He concludes:
Beck remains earnest and confessional, warning his viewers against ‘normalcy bias’—i.e., common sense—and complaining how he will be taken out of context. The problem is that there is no context to his stream of consciousness—it is all pinpoints and undertow, and the contradictions flow. He is still desperately practicing group polarization and selling special knowledge, like all conspiracy entrepreneurs. After a 20-minute monologue, he took his first commercial break. It was, inevitably, someone selling Gold, followed by a pitch for survival seeds to those who want to “declare food independence.”
A closing note: One year ago, when Wingnuts was published as the first BeastBook, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Keith Olbermann were put on the cover because they were the most public faces for the problem I was trying to describe—the return of the paranoid style in American politics and the cycle of incitement that was empowering the extremes while drowning out the vast vital center.
What a difference a year makes—now Keith Olbermann is off the air, Glenn Beck is slinking that way and Sarah Palin’s poll numbers have imploded to the point where her prospective presidential campaign already sounds like a bad old joke.
It is a heartening turn of events—a reaffirmation that the American people are smart and instinctively distrust the ideological extremes of left and right. The Howard Beale howl ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’ has been turned on its head—as a sign at the Jon Stewart ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ happily predicted: ‘You’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more!’
Go to the link and read it IN FULL.
—Zennie62:
Beck, a hyper-conservative given to wild and hard-to-substantiate claims, and the occasionally crazy rant (to where the blog Gawker’s called him an “unhinged crybaby”), has lost a slew of advertisers (like Geico and Proctor & Gamble), so it’s no surprise that his daily TV show’s coming to an end.
Glenn just plain does stupid things on his show and on Fox. From calling President Obama racist, then taking back the statement, to the consistent use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery, upsetting not just Jewish groups, but anyone who has at least half-a-brain to be aware of what’s decent and acceptable to do on television.
–Here’s Beck’s full press release as published on this must-read-in-full post on The Atlantic’s Wire:
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.
–You Tube has this medley of Glenn Beck high lowlights
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3J_QLtYqlk&feature=player_embedded
—Canada’s The Globe and Mail:
Fox’s announcement that Mr. Beck will end his weekday show this year signals more than the parting of the top U.S. cable news network and its most notorious property. It underscores a shift in the national mood.
In short, Americans just aren’t that angry any more.
The conspiracy-theory-laced rants against Mr. Obama and the left that made Mr. Beck so captivating for an audience of Americans grappling to come to terms with a changing world now sound tired. No one can cry wolf that often and expect to get the same rise out of viewers.
In August 2009, I asked the question, “Is there a point at which most reasonable people will start realizing that Glenn Beck is a raving freakazoid nut sandwich?”
This led to Beck calling me out by name on his show. It took a year and a half after that to reach Peak Beck, but he who laughs last, laughs best.
Beck accomplished a lot for Republicans because he helped form the Tea Party movement for FOX, but now it’s time for slightly more sanity as the election approaches. I’ve said that FOX can get very good ratings by whoever they decide to use at the 5PM EST hour because of the election so there’s no real loss there. John Stossel would happily fill that role. He’s got his own kind of crazy going on. Maybe he’ll sell his kidney since he’s for organ selling. Probably someone from FOX Business since they are a training ground now for their pundits or act as a landing station for those kicked off other networks. But Beck will still be lurking around in some form or another..
Beck has reportedly expressed an interest in leading a cable channel of his own, but if the guy can’t get advertisers now, and he’s on the most-watched cable news network in the country, it’s hard to imagine Beck would find sponsors for an entire network.
He has other options, but if Beck is still tethered to the real world at all, he’ll realize that his schtick is wearing thin. His audience is shrinking, his radio show is losing stations, his books aren’t selling well, and his live shows have fewer attendees. As career trajectories go, Beck appears to be well past his peak, and the clock seems to be inching ever closer to his 16th minute of fame.
Beck’s departure from Fox News will likely mean less publicity and a quicker departure from the public eye.
Given the toxicity he brings to the discourse, good riddance.
Beck is currently averaging about 2.2 million viewers per night, so I doubt this is about ratings. Nor is it a media ‘divorce.’
Beck is likely looking to expand, producing other content for FOX through his company and perhaps even by doing a total or partial takeover of an existing cable channel. It’s obvious that the relationship between him and FOX is still very much ongoing.
Can you imagine how the Left’s collective head would explode if Beck and FOX took over say, CNN and made it into a conservative news channel?
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.