Oh, Glenn. We hardly knew ya.
In case you haven't heard, Glenn Beck will be giving up his Fox program later this year. His ratings had fallen dramatically in recent months (though he still beats his rivals on CNN and MSNBC), he lost hundreds of advertisers because of his more controversial statements, and within Fox, people were apparently embarrassed to be associated with him (though for some reason, the daily Mensa confab that is Fox & Friends remains safe). Beck will still have his nationally syndicated radio show, and his websites, and the eight or 10 books he writes a year. But he won't be on TV.
And TV is really what gave Beck all the attention he gets. His audience on radio is much larger than that on TV -- these days he gets under 2 million viewers a night, while Talkers magazine estimates his radio audience at 9 million -- and it was nearly that size before he came to Fox. But for the nation's media and political establishment, being on television is what makes you an important person, one worth writing about and talking about.
I'm guessing that relatively few people who read the Prospect actually ever sat through an hour of Beck's television program. But even if you've just seen some clips on The Daily Show, you've seen enough to understand: It's completely nuts. Not just ideologically extreme, which you could say about other programs on the network, but a level of sheer mania that just boggles the mind. I really don't think there's ever been anything like it on American television.
And that may have been part of what led to Beck's decline. Once he started drawing circles and arrows on that blackboard, painting every new development in the world as part of the secular/liberal/Islamist/communist conspiracy, it was really all or nothing. You couldn't be a casual Beck viewer -- either you followed him down the rabbit hole where the terrifying machinations of the sinister forces were revealed, and you needed to start stockpiling gold and "survival seeds," or you didn't. Beckian paranoia is a whole worldview, one even most conservatives couldn't stomach. And so many of those conservatives began turning against him when they realized that he was discrediting their movement. (In this memorable post, Richmond Ramsey described conservatives' consternation at "Fox Geezer Syndrome," in which the network, particularly Beck, turns old people into ranting conspiracy theorists.) Beck never inspired the same kind of fear in elite conservatives that Rush Limbaugh did.
So that left him without much support as his show got more tiring. If every night you're being told that Armageddon is right around the corner, after a while you begin to wonder why it hasn't come. And the shtick just gets old. If tomorrow Lindsay Lohan ran over a squirrel, Beck would tell you she was put up to it by George Soros, working with ACORN and the ghost of Leon Trotsky to lull us to sleep while the totalitarian takeover proceeds. As Beck said on his show yesterday, "This is a global time we live in," because things aren't just happening here in the U.S., things are actually happening in many places around the world, unlike in prior eras, when ... oh, never mind. You probably wouldn't understand. But here's a taste:
