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Go Home The Decline of Glenn Beck

POLITICS MARCH 3, 2011

The Decline of Glenn Beck

BY JAMES DOWNIE

Six months ago, Glenn Beck held his “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall, drawing a crowd of about 100,000. Newspapers and magazines featured the rally on front pages around the country. The next month, The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover story to him. “In record time,” the piece observed, “Beck has traveled the loop of curiosity to ratings bonanza to self-parody to sage.”

Just six months later, however, Beck seems to have traveled somewhere else entirely. His ratings and reputation are in steep decline: His show has lost more than one million viewers over the course of the past year, falling from an average of 2.9 million in January 2010 to 1.8 million in January 2011. He now ranks fifth among Fox’s six weekday talk hosts, trailing lesser-known personalities like Shepard Smith and Bret Baier. Beck’s three-hour radio show has been dropped in several major cities, including New York and Philadelphia, and has seen a ratings decline in most other markets. “It’s hard to gain a million viewers,” says Eric Boehlert, who follows Beck’s shows for the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, “but it’s really hard to lose a million viewers.” And Beck’s fall contrasts with the fortunes of other Fox News hosts, like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, whose TV ratings stayed solid throughout 2010.

Beck’s commercial viability also seems to have suffered. His viewership among 25- to 54-year-olds, a prized advertising demographic, declined by almost one-half in 2010. An advertising boycott organized by liberal groups has caused over 300 companies—including Procter & Gamble, UPS, Coca-Cola, and Wal-Mart—to stop showing commercials during Beck’s show. The Beck brand isn’t what it used to be off the airwaves either: His most recent non-fiction book, Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure, was his first book in eight years not to reach number one on The New York Times best-seller list.

Meanwhile, as a group, prominent conservatives have seemed more willing to speak out against Beck recently. Though some on the right always disparaged him—several profiles last year included anonymous Fox insiders criticizing Beck—almost none were willing to do so with their names attached. Recently, however, conservatives have been criticizing Beck openly. Bill O’Reilly, who feted him for an hour after the Restoring Honor rally, has rapidly become more and more dismissive. The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has criticized Beck’s “rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East.” Conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin called Beck a “ranting extremist,” and former Bush administration staffer Pete Wehner wrote for Commentary’s website, “If conservatism were ever to hitch its wagon to this self-described rodeo clown, it would collapse as a movement.”

What happened? Beck built a following by making outlandish, conspiratorial claims—about ACORN, Obama, and so on. (Bizarrely, his extremism may have augmented the number of curious liberal viewers tuning in: A Pew Research Center poll from last September found that 9 percent of Beck’s Fox viewers identified as Democrats, and 21 percent as moderates or liberals.) But “anytime you have extreme stimulus,” says Alexander Zaitchik, author of the unauthorized Beck biography Common Nonsense, “you’ll have diminishing returns.” Beck, says Zaitchik, was caught “in a vicious circle”: To keep viewers coming back, he had to keep creating new, more intricate theories. Last November, in a two-part special that indirectly invoked anti-Semitism, he accused liberal Jewish financier George Soros of orchestrating the fall of foreign governments for financial gain. During the Egyptian Revolution, Beck sided with Hosni Mubarak, alleging that his fall was “controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Beck is now warning viewers not to use Google, accusing the search-engine giant of “being deep in bed with the government.” In recent months, it seems, Beck’s theories became so outlandish that even conservatives—both viewers and media personalities—were having a hard time stomaching them. Now, each new idea appears to be costing Beck both eyeballs and credibility. “At some point,” says Boehlert, “it doesn’t add up any more.”

To be fair, Beck’s decline may be stark in part because of the extraordinary rapidity of his earlier ascent. “What he was doing in his first two years was unprecedented,” says Zaitchik. And Michael Harrison of Talkers, a radio trade publication, cautions that, “in radio,” one has “to look [at] over a year’s ratings. … It’s just too soon to determine anything.”

Then there is always the possibility he will still recover. Beck has successfully changed his persona before: He was a morning drive-time DJ on Top 40 stations long before becoming a political pundit. “He’s a showman,” says Harrison. “I have no doubt in my mind” he’ll adapt. On the other hand, maybe Beck really has reached a tipping point. Demagogues, after all, have a way of outwearing their welcome.

James Downie is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.

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35 comments

"To be fair, Beck’s decline may be stark in part because of the extraordinary rapidity of his earlier ascent." Change "may be stark in part" to "was as predictable as the descent of a helium balloon that slips out of a child's hand" and you have a better idea what happened. There's nothing there. If nothing else, he has been up against conservative commentators who have done things like governed or been real reporters and whose thoughts originate from someplace in their bodies above their waists. Anther example is Coulter, even though she was a Supreme Court judicial clerk, though you wouldn't know it. (Why MSNBC gives her publicity by putting her on shows how it struggles for content too— running Road Runner cartoons in those spaces would be more illuminating and entertaining.) He is the right wing equivalent of Howard Stern: Know Nothing punditry for the 5th grade.

- SFergessen

March 4, 2011 at 7:52am

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If it was merely "know nothing punditry for the fifth grade", he'd be fine. Rush Limbaugh still has a very popular radio show. Beck's problem is that his conspiracy theories are becoming wilder and wider in scope -- at some point, even fifth graders say "What? Quit using Google? Are you crazy?" Beck has simply mis-judged his audience -- or fallen into the classic Demagogue trap, beginning to believe your own propaganda.

- AllanL5

March 4, 2011 at 8:25am

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what Allan said

- Tristan

March 4, 2011 at 8:41am

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He's following the standard trajectory of a demagogue, merely time-compressed. Father Coughlin for the the 21st century.

- K_Wilson

March 4, 2011 at 10:15am

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Wow, so PT Barnum was wrong? It actually IS possible to lose money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people? That is so cool. Note that I said possible, not inevitable. Working with that helium baloon analogy from the first post, there are other gasbags (Limbaugh among them) that seem to keep rising and rising without popping and descending. And still others (Gingrich) that seem capable of infinite re-inflation.

- gwcross

March 4, 2011 at 11:11am

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I wonder what Jon Stewart will do when Glenn Beck finally goes away. Sometimes it seems like Beck supplies most of Stewart's material. I'll bet some of those moderate and liberal Beck viewers the Pew poll identifies are Daily Show fans who think that Beck can't possibly be as crazy as he appears to be on The Daily Show and want to see if Stewart is exaggerating. Anyone who has seen Beck in action knows that he only looks like a sane and rational person when standing next to Charlie Sheen.

- Clareita

March 4, 2011 at 11:19am

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Net 5PM P2+ (000s) 25-54 (000s) 35-64 (000s) FNC GLENN BECK 1,966 484 965 CNN SITUATION ROOM 599 122 195 MSNBC HARDBALL WITH C. MATTHEWS 673 147 254 CNBC FAST MONEY 190 43 108 HLN SHOWBIZ TONIGHT 238 55 91 The above are the Cable News Ratings for Wednesday, March 3, 2001.

- Bukharin

March 4, 2011 at 12:27pm

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Oops. Make that 2011.

- Bukharin

March 4, 2011 at 12:30pm

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What's "Google"?

- icarusr

March 4, 2011 at 1:15pm

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It's simple to me. He's lost viewers because once went on O'Reilly's show, he said that gay marriage wasn't that big a deal to him. Can't believe that's not mentioned here. Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending Beck. The whole Frances Fox-Piven/Richard Cloward conspiracy schtick is ludicrous, but he's more libertarian than the rest of the crowd at Fox News and he was bound to pay for that when people figured out what being a libertarian sometimes may mean in terms of social issues.

- Lundell

March 4, 2011 at 2:45pm

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Let's see if the same thing can be done to Rush Limbaugh.

- pmchai

March 4, 2011 at 4:36pm

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Won't happen. Rush is just rude, crude and obnoxious. Beck is madder than a box of badgers.

- zardoz67

March 4, 2011 at 5:20pm

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If you are interested in knowing where Glenn Beck's ideas and theories are coming from, listen to Arthur R. Thompson, CEO of the John Birch Society ("JBS"). His weekly broadcast is Beck's playbook. It is a mystery only to the New Republic that Glenn Beck is a fellow traveler of the revived JBS. Every notion that Beck advances, including the Egyptian Revolution is “controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood” is first advanced by the JBS and Mr. Thompson. It should also be noted that corporations in the UK have stopped advertising on Beck's program.

- LawrenceGulotta

March 4, 2011 at 10:43pm

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Glenn Beck incoherent ideas area mishmash of different right wing economic notions including the John Birch Society as LawrenceGulotta noted.

- arnon

March 4, 2011 at 11:31pm

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I don't know how many people here are aware of another bizarre right wing ideology that is trying to pass as "leftist:" "Elitist revolutionary strutting" ""The Coming Insurrection" was greeted by two of Germany's leading feuilletons as exhiliarating, important left-wing theory. But it is an anti-modern, right-wing re-import, says Johannes Thumfart" http://www.signandsight.com/features/2112.html

- arnon

March 4, 2011 at 11:34pm

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Well, I always thought like Morton Downey, Beck would really be competeing with himself. He has to get more and more crazy by the nature of his program. He is also like a preacher who says the "rapture" is right around the corner. When it doesn't happen, he inevitably starts losing people. The George Soros/Socialist/coup/death camps/shiarah law/communist revolution hasn't happened, so what does he do?

- MikeB.

March 4, 2011 at 11:59pm

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What Beck does to attract attention requires him to keep upping the ante and yet he still receives diminishing returns. The Marquise de Sade understood this process when applied to pornography which begins with a furtive embrace and proceeds step by step to ritualized murder. In order for Beck to reverse his downward trajectory he will have to murder a liberal on air.

- paskunac

March 5, 2011 at 7:47am

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Beck is an entertainer. And so is the talking horse on MSNBC (a/k/a the "Ed Show"). Intelligent political discourse on TV ended with Crossfire (if it ever existed at all); it never existed on radio. Sometimes I have the impression that entertainment is all that American industry has left to offer. Of course, the first rule in business is know your customer.

- rayward

March 5, 2011 at 8:06am

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my theory on beck's decline: after obama's election, beck became the defacto leader of the 'obama is a thug!' paranoid faction. he'd display obama next to giant pics of hitler and stalin and mussolini and try to claim that obama was another in a line of oppressive charismatic thugs. here's the thing though; obama isn't a thug, at all. obama is in fact kind of a nerd. once obama became better known as president, this fact became obvious to more and more people and the 'obama as a thug' theme became impossible to sell. propaganda needs at least a sliver of truth.

- mmathog

March 5, 2011 at 4:32pm

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I'd note this: "Then there is always the possibility he will still recover. Beck has successfully changed his persona before: He was a morning drive-time DJ on Top 40 stations long before becoming a political pundit. “He’s a showman,” says Harrison. “I have no doubt in my mind” he’ll adapt." I hate Beck. What I find incredible is that anyone takes him seriously. So I find it interesting that people I know here in Canada on the moronic right follow him seriously, while smart rightsters I know here dislike him as much as I do. The other thing I don't get is the number of smart people who give Rush Limbaugh the time of day. For example Ann Althouse, who interests me, likes Limbaugh a lot. That mystifies me. I've only listened to snatches of him but what I heard was smarter and more manipulative than Beck, with even a tinge of humour, but lousy and racist nonetheless.

- basman

March 5, 2011 at 9:09pm

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...Intelligent political discourse on TV ended with Crossfire... Really? What about Maddow, Spitzer, Matthews, Zakaria, Baier, Crowley, Wallace, McLaughlin, Gregory with co-panelists and guests and the like, varying in ability and no Mike Kinsleys (who could be?)--the only really effective guy on Crossfire-- to be sure? There's some good, reasonably intelligent stuff there, understanding they are appealing to a mass audience of non experts and non specialists, which includes me.

- basman

March 5, 2011 at 9:19pm

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"paskunac": Ahh the memories! What my mother always called me when I was a kid and getting into trouble, and with malice aforethought in her for a certainty.

- basman

March 5, 2011 at 9:22pm

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"Well, I always thought like Morton Downey, Beck would really be competeing with himself. He has to get more and more crazy by the nature of his program." For years, this is exactly what I thought would happen to Beck. He would end up like Downey. Nice when my predictions come true.

- MOLLYSIMON

March 6, 2011 at 12:02am

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What about the not unlikely scenario that this former alcoholic (recovering, recoverd, whatever) has a mental illness that is accellerating? And while he might yet be crazy as a fox (as demonstrated by his varied successful repurposing of his life/career), he just might be crazy. And he's really not very smart/intelligent/well-educated/mentally disciplined. As far as the audience go, there are a lot of uneducated/un-mentally disciplined people who get sucked in by emotion and enthusiasm. Enough to form a decent core audience. The others were probably just passers by. I hope. I myself go ape shit agape whenever I get exposed to even 20 seconds of him. I mean seriously, it can't really be entertainment to people any more. A few buy it and the rest are dropping off to avoid become sick.

- ericad

March 6, 2011 at 10:23am

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To be clear, Crossfire was the crossroads for political discourse on TV; Kinsley left because of the direction the show, and those that followed, took at the crossroads. Granted, Maddow is no talking horse, and does make a concerted effort to educate rather than pontificate; but she is the exception on cable. Sorry, but Matthews needs to get off his high horse. On network TV, Gregory has been better than I expected; better even than his predecessor (who wanted to be everybody's best friend). I suppose I have difficulty taking Gregory seriously because not long after the Iraq invasion he declared that GWB would go down as one of our best presidents, up there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. Gregory reflects whatever is the current CW, a typical TV "personality" seeking ratings.

- rayward

March 6, 2011 at 12:17pm

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Hmmmm. A whole page of Beck-bashing. It would be interesting to see all the other talk-show hosts (left and right) dissected so thoroughly. I would also be interested to know how many hours do the critics actually spend listening or watching Beck. Could it be that a Beck-Basher, when asked, "how often do you watch Beck?"....would the answer be, "Never...I can't stand to listen to him" It is my guess that most Beck-Bashers rely on the criticisms of their favorite media outlet for a quick and easy summation of Glenn Beck...and, since most left-leaning media outlets tend to quote Beck out of context...then these opinions are based on something that is not true. I do not watch Glenn Beck's television show. I am a fan of the old radio show. Glenn Beck has been "The #3 most listened-to Radio Show" for many many years. And it still is. No change. He hasn't been on TV for very long at all. In fact, comparing his success on TV to everyone else, seems a bit premature. I support Glenn Beck because in the old radio show, you learned who he is. He is not an extremist, as many of you would like to spew. His character has been hanging out there for all to see....for many many years. He is not a libertarian. He is not a Republican. He is someone who tries to see through all noise of what the manipulators would like to blast in your face. Most people gulp up the loud rhetoric, and that's what I'm seeing here. This article is an analysis of a tiny fragment of time. It is not illustrative of the man....only of the ebb and flow of the audience, current events, and political winds. Hmmm....People attacking that which they do not understand. Sheesh.

- John_Hart

March 7, 2011 at 11:10am

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Ah, so some people are NOT as smart as a fifth-grader. Fair enough.

- AllanL5

March 7, 2011 at 11:40am

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Well...I really don't think it has anything to do with whether I am as smart as, or less than as smart as, a fifth-grader, Allan. It has to do with un-substantiated attacks at that which you do not understand. With Glenn Beck...you really don't possess the ability or objectivity or drive to analyze everything that the man has to say.....so you conveniently pick one and attack, like, "...at some point, even fifth graders say 'What? Quit using Google? Are you crazy?'" Then....as typical...you use that one example, and eloquently project it around everything else...as if it were the shining, all-encompassing example, of the rest of the things that come out of one man's mouth. Unfortunately, this methodology is dishonest. It is a game. If you apply that methodology to everyone....then everyone would suck. Because everyone says stupid things. Even Einstein said stupid things. Stephen Hawking says stupid things. Obama says stupid things. Ratings are not an example of legitimacy. They are an example of how many people are watching something. If you consider every variable that affects the volume of the audience, then you make an honest assessment. If you consider only one variable....then you are lying to yourself.

- John_Hart

March 7, 2011 at 1:19pm

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I have come back here. Here's a balanced review of Beck vis a vis an intelligent and fair minded review of a couple of books about him: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/09/beck-revelation/?pagination=false I have wtached enough of Beck to dismiss him as anyone with anything to say substantively worth listening to as well as disliking him strongly. Some may find him entertaining (though I wouldn't know why.) And I don't know if he means what he says, though in that regard I'll take him at his word. He is intellectually obscene, without redeeming intellectual value, meant to arouse merely prurient intellectual interest. He floats the widest of conspiracy theories worthy of Jack van Impe, drawing connections leading to Obama wanting to turn America into a socialist republic. He wants to shatter the difference between church and state and in that wants America to be rooted in Christian values. He asserts a primitivistic libertarianism which makes a mockery of the arguments of serious living libertarian thinkers like, for example, Brink Lindsey. Rather than go on about him: here's the challenge I would put to anyone who wants to defend him as having anything intellecually interesting to say: evidence please? The distinction here is between thinkers with whom I disagree but whose substance and analytical power I respect and clowns like Beck, who parade as substantive, but aren't. So, again, evidence please? John_Hart?

- basman

March 7, 2011 at 8:07pm

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The Ickman cometh, and now he goeth? Do your friends here mean nothing to you? Come on, man. This place just won't be the same, as so many before me have said.

- MOLLYSIMON

March 7, 2011 at 11:11pm

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Molly Simon wrong thread I think. Re Beck: Alana Goodman, today : "In case you missed it yesterday morning, Howard Kurtz had Jennifer Rubin and David Frum on Reliable Sources to make the conservative case against Glenn Beck."

- basman

March 8, 2011 at 12:02am

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basman....I appreciate your view. In fact, I appreciate it so much that I'll spend some time compiling some thoughts and examples for a meaningful discussion. My main complaint here is that people on the left and right and in the center are generalized by folks in different camps too often, while using single examples of quotes and incidences or ad hominem deflections. I see this as serving no useful purpose. If we are to have global instantaneous communications, I think that each of us as individuals should strive for honest discourse, rather than the deceptive discourse that seems so prevalent in the online community. Give me a little while to compose my thoughts and I'll come back with a response that is as objective as possible.

- John_Hart

March 8, 2011 at 9:17am

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I'm all for honest discourse, but I have this stupid prejudice that people who get paid large sums of money to opine on major TV channels should be doing something to promote such discourse. Just my weird sensitivities, I know. But when someone says, as Glen Beck has, that 1.7 million people attended his pathetic "rally" in Washington DC when the most generous assessment put the crowd at 70,000 (note, not 700,000, but 70,000), then he is not striving for honest discourse but rather lying discourse with a side dish of megalomania.

- ironyroad

March 8, 2011 at 9:52pm

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I realize I'm late to the party here, but is it possible that the cratering of Beck's audience has to do at least in part with the overall improvement in the employment picture? I mean, you have to consider what kinds of people are sitting around their living rooms at 5:00 PM on weekdays tuning in to the teevee. Once you filter out the retirees, the disabled and those working graveyard shifts, most of the rest are unemployed or underemployed. If you have such a big dropoff in the younger demographic of viewers, my bet is that many of those viewers didn't have full-time, 9-5 jobs a year ago but do now and are unable to tune in to The Great White Hope at 5 Eastern, 4 Central.

- wildboy

March 9, 2011 at 12:19pm

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...mean, you have to consider what kinds of people are sitting around their living rooms at 5:00 PM on weekdays tuning in to the teevee... Guilty once in a while. Flip Beck and forth, when I'm not giving blood or talking people down from high building ledges, amongst Hardball, Beck, ShowBiz Tonite, CBC News, reruns both of Law and Order and Macedonian Heritage Hour. That's my life poor thing that it is

- basman

March 9, 2011 at 1:34pm

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