"Why Glenn Beck lost it" from The Washington Post.

[anneboleyn]

This is an interesting opinion piece concerning Beck's demise, written by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post (4/6/11).

Link to the full text:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2011/04/06/AFNEgnqC_story.html

Excerpt from article:

"Why Glenn Beck lost it" Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

On Friday, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent, as businesses added jobs for the 13th straight month.

On Wednesday, Fox News announced that it was ending Glenn Beck’s daily cable-TV show.

These are not unrelated events.

When Beck’s show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck’s angry broadcasts about the nation’s imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

But as the recession began to ease, Beck’s apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.

He pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down. He spun a conspiracy theory in which the American left was in cahoots with an emerging caliphate in the Middle East. And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.

This vile turn for Beck reached its logical extreme two weeks ago, when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what is happening in our world today.”

[TxVietVet]

1. So, now beckkk is out. Ain't that a f*cking shame?

His poor conservanazi ass will have to hustle some other way. More wingnuts will listen to him on radio, if he can stay on.

[anneboleyn]

3. I will miss Jon Stewart's hilarious parodies of Beck. They were so spot on.

Stewart would peer into the camera, rub his face, look uber serious. Then he would make some ridiculous Beck-ian comment, crazy conspiracy-style, about something totally preposterous, like the fact that squirrels are in top-secret negotiations to steal our picnic lunches. The best thing was that if one looked at Stewart's comments and Beck's comments they were hard to distinguish.

[anneboleyn]

2. another excerpt from the opinion piece (Palin). It takes a few minutes to read but it's good.

"There are, happily, signs that the influences that undermined Beck are doing the same to other purveyors of fear. The March Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Sarah Palin’s favorability rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents had dropped to 58 percent from 70 percent in October and 88 percent in 2008. Her negative ratings among Republicans are higher than those of other prospective Republican presidential candidates.

In another indication of abating anger, a CNN poll released last week found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent have a favorable view.

Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive “the money changers from the temple” became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced."

[Recursion]

4. Sadly you can find some of the same paranoia on our side, too (nt)

[intheflow]

6. But most of ours is reality-based.

As in: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you. Beck saw insanity as Fox reported it as truth; we see injustice and it gets reported as insanity. There are very few instances where the people on the left who've been painted as ranters aren't proven right in the long run.

[Recursion]

13. No, I meant literally the same conspiracy theories re: the Fed (nt)

[devilgrrl]

7. From DU or Mass Media?

If you're referring to some of the people on DU, then yes, I agree but do cite an example from the left that has as much media exposure as Beck.

[Recursion]

8. Oh, that's a definite imbalance, which actually worked out for us

Could you imagine if the "The twin towers were never built it was all a mass hallucination" people had gotten the coverage the birthers/Beckites did?

[intheflow]

10. I have never heard this CT.

And I'm pretty well versed in 9-11 CTs. You cannot possibly compare something as obscure as this, supposedly from "the left," with Beck's minute-by-minute lunatic rants on national (international) television.

[Recursion]

12. That one was a joke

And, yes, the truthers are about on the level of insanity of Glenn Beck, which is why we're lucky our side's lunatics didn't get the coverage their side's did.

[gratuitous]

5. Beck didn't "push further into dark conspiracies"

He just thought it was safe to come out with every little hobgoblin occupying his fevered little brain. The evidence was there all along for anyone to see. Milbank finally feels it's safe to call the nutjob a nutjob. When Beck was foisting himself on the national consciousness and spinning out the crazy to provide a pretext for folks like Byron Williams, Milbank couldn't be bothered with it. Or he was hiding under his desk, hoping to avoid becoming a target.

I don't suppose there's anything wrong with looking out for your own skin, but it irks me to see "brave" journalists who finally get around to speaking some truth only when there's no risk in doing so.

[anneboleyn]

14. good point about Milbank waiting until Beck was out to point out the nutjobbery.

[stevedeshazer]

9. Dana Milbank rubs me the wrong way, but he's right on Beck. n/t

[Canuckistanian]

11. It should be "When did Glenn Beck Ever Have It?"

He was ALWAYS a slow-motion train wreck.