It’s probably too much to hope for, but at least the conventional wisdom has shifted enough that the NYTimes Media Villagers are willing to suggest that “Fox and Glenn Beck Stare Into A Dark Future“:
… Mr. Beck, a conservative Jeremiah and talk-radio phenomenon, burst into television prominence in 2009 by taking the forsaken 5 p.m. slot on Fox News and turning it into a juggernaut. A conjurer of conspiracies who spotted sedition everywhere he looked, Mr. Beck struck a big chord and ended up on the cover of Time magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and held rallies all over the country that were mobbed with acolytes. He achieved unheard-of ratings, swamped the competition and at times seemed to threaten the dominion of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity at Fox.
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But a funny thing happened on the way from the revolution. Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox — a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion — more than one million viewers — especially in the younger demographic.
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He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined. But the erosion is significant enough that Fox News officials are willing to say — anonymously, of course; they don’t want to be identified as criticizing the talent — that they are looking at the end of his contract in December and contemplating life without Mr. Beck….
cleek
which just proves that even Fox is in on the conspiracy.
MikeJ
Fox wants to get the super ultra crazy hidden away before election season hots up.
Benjamin Cisco
From their keyboard to the FSM’s, um, noodles.
cathyx
But how many of those viewers are people who only watch in order to report on the crazy?
Zifnab
@MikeJ:
Nah. Beck is a Palinite, and FOX isn’t interested in pushing her candidacy. Beck is also a bit of a mad dog and doesn’t like toeing the party line.
Back in ’08, the entire network lined up behind Giuliani. I imagine Murdoch has his own pick for ’12, and he doesn’t want Glenn mucking things up by going off the reservation.
different church-lady
If we ever needed a crystal clear example of the dysfunction of the American corporate mindset, we have it right here: “He’s #1 in his timeslot, but we’re gonna can his ass because he’s less #1 than he used to be.”
I find it completely bizarre that I’m using Beck as an example of how the American economy has no relationship to a meritocracy, but there it is.
mclaren
The culture wars will end when Beck’s audience drops to three nuns and a whippet. We can always hope.
Redshirt
Robo-Ultra-Mega-Beck has finally been finished in the lab, and they’re preparing the transition. You thought you saw crazy before?!
piratedan
obviously Beck simply needs more cowbell…..
MattF
A Beck/Fox breakup could happen, I guess– Beck has, in fact crossed a few don’t-go-there lines recently, and the prospect of more of that makes Fox management nervous, no doubt.
But I don’t expect it. When Yosemite Beck crosses some line in the sand, it makes the other Fox personalities look relatively sane– and when national advertisers quit Beck’s show, Fox execs can point out that they will get access to the same audience by shifting to O’Reilly, after all.
RossInDetroit
Fox is a business. Their purpose is making money. If they make a change to their programming, money has to be behind it. Viewership isn’t everything. The show is on the air to sell commercial time. If the advertisers are unhappy and unwilling to pay to be associated with nutboy Beck, then Fox will can him. It’s got to be something with the revenue stream from commercials.
meh
suckers. This is a two-fold win for fox. One it gets Liberals excited at the thought of Fox dumping Beck (ain’t gonna happen – and the collective liberal sigh when it doesn’t happen will provide multiple orgasm’s to Coulter/Palin/Kristol) and two it’s a negotiating tactic for FSM sake!
Joe Buck
I’m skeptical. Yes, Beck’s ratings are way down, but is there really someone they can replace him with who would draw more? I think that this is a negotiating tactic to get Beck to settle for less money when he renews, and I suppose it’s possible that if he demands more money for lower ratings and advertiser boycotts, they could drop him.
The Moar You Know
Bullshit. I read this drivel yesterday. I’m sorry, but TV does not work this way.
When this is the case:
you don’t lose your time slot. Beck will be on Fox well past 2012. You can count on it. You can also count on him supporting anyone that the GOP puts forward to be their knight in shining armor, because Beck knows who signs his very large paychecks.
The Times article is ludicrous wishful thinking.
Caren
Zifnab’s got it.
As long as Glenn propagandists the way Murdoch and Ailes want him to, he’s free to run wild.
He brings in big numbers for cable, but it does NOT translate to advertising dollars, since most companies refuse to air ads during his time slot. He gets Goldline and ambulance chasers.
He’s aired in Europe without ANY ads for over a year.
If it was about revenue, Glenn would have been fired long ago. It’s not. It’s about propagandizing a fake reality, and if Glenn’s world no longer resembles Murdoch/Ailes’, then he’s toast.
It’s being a Palinista that dooms him, not his total disconnect from reality.
Southern Beale
I really hate to quibble over this shit but I remember when an independent estimate conducted by a company CBS News hired put the number at 87,000. So now it’s over 100,000? It annoys me because it shows how the New York Times media villagers have unblinkingly — unthinkingly — internalized the conservative slant. Facts are fungible, I guess.
But hey what’s 13,000 people between friends, amiright? Over 13,000 rally to protest Scott Walker on a weekday and nobody fucking blinks.
And since we’re talking numbers, it’s interesting that 700 Teanuts showed up to support Walker over the weekend and it was on ALL the news, even my local news. Yet in the pouring rain on Saturday, with flood watches all over the place, over 3,000 people rallied to support teachers in Nashville. No one (except my local news) bothered to cover it.
So, you know, same as it ever was.
Just Some Fuckhead
Maybe they just died of old age?
Professor
@different church-lady: But who told you that Capitalism is about Meritocracy? It is about monarchical. Son inherits after father! James Murdoch will follow his father at News Corp. Mark my word and I am in London.
Caren
And as Moar says, if Glenn toes the line and supports the “right” candidate, he’ll air forever, whether or not he has any ad revenue.
Southern Beale
And by the way, let me point out that I wrote about this a whole month ago. And what the New York Times piece may not address (I didn’t follow the links) is that the people REALLY worried about Glenn Beck are major NewsCorp shareholders, like Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal; the GOP, which is trying to rebrand itself for a presidential election which means dialing back the crazy to appeal to the mushy middle; and Rupert Murdoch, who is in big trouble in the UK and whose BSkyB deal may be scuttled.
I wrote on Feb. 6:
I think I’m right and I think the New York Times is late to the game. So there.
RossInDetroit
Is being crazy and a liar really enough to get you kicked off Fox? I don’t have enough confidence in News Corp to believe that.
Ija
Yeah, but it’s by David Carr, he’s written a lot of critical things about Fox News in the past. It’s more a David Carr thing than a NYT thing. I wouldn’t get to excited and look at this as any change in Villagers conventional wisdom.
Mike E
@Just Some Fuckhead: Or did they find just empty clothes?
PaulW
This is open thread?
Anyone know a good place to advertise (on the cheap) your ebooks? I have a blog and stuff, but I need to find a place with good-sized traffic where e-readers would be looking for new reads to download…
PaulW
@RossInDetroit:
Actually, yes there is. There does get to be a point where the crazy wears thin and the circus-freak factor of watching someone go off the reservation dies down. Just look at Charlie Sheen. For one week his crazy was car-wreck worthy of attention. Now everyone’s writing about how “dude, he needs help.”
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mike E: Whoa, I never considered The Rapture.
bemused
If Beck really did get dumped, I’m trying to imagine how the Beck junkies would cope without their daily insane hate fix.
different church-lady
@Professor:
I think I saw it on Fox.
Just Some Fuckhead
@PaulW:
It is not possible to reach peak wingnut. Think of it as a curve that gets closer and closer but never touches.
geg6
@RossInDetroit:
This is exactly it. He can’t get or hold onto advertisers. It’s the same with his radio show, which has been dropped from several markets. No one will advertise for fear that they will be boycotted or, worse, shamed. Murdoch has kept him on the air in Britain with NO ADVERTISING AT ALL because British advertisers don’t want associated with the crazy.
Advertisers have dropped like flies for Beck’s show here in the US, for the same reason. If FOX and Murdoch/Ailes can’t make $$ off Beck, he will go regardless of the number of viewers he has.
NonyNony
@RossInDetroit:
This is true, but there are lots of ways to make money beyond just ratings and advertising dollars.
But to go right to that point – Beck has been losing a LOT of advertisers. And that might be why Fox News is thinking about pulling the plug on his contract. Even if he’s beating all of his competition in his timeslot, it doesn’t do Fox a damn bit of good if they can’t get primo dinero for advertising at that time. If they have to be cutting deals for advertising for low-rent gold scams when they could be showing Ford or Budweiser ads in the same time slot with a different host – even if he draws fewer viewers – there’s a give and take there that the beancounters appreciate.
And that’s before we get to other ways that Beck is a liability. If Ailes wants to back some candidate that Beck hates, there’s no way to put the leash on Beck once he’s signed a contract. The other Fox News hosts fall into line, but Beck is a wild card. And if Ailes decides he wants to line the network up to push someone Beck won’t support as their chosen candidate, well, he doesn’t want Beck going off the reservation.
But the most likely idea is that this is a negotiating tactic – both to try to scare Beck into taking a smaller contract AND to scare Beck into toeing the network line. The question is whether Beck would take it or if he’d be content to go back to his radio show and to scribble in “News Corp” into his grand conspiracy network…
ETA: what geg said above – beat me to it.
RossInDetroit
I still think dollars has something to do with this. The younger demo, which Beck is losing fastest, is the most desirable to advertisers. Plenty of companies don’t want to be associated with him at all, restricting who Fox can sell ad space to and forcing their prices lower.
If they could replace him with someone who was less of a lightning rod for scorn and brought in the same ad dollars, even from a smaller audience, I think they’d do it in a heart beat.
ETA: convergence of thinking here…
mark
David Carr is a buffoon. Out-of-control drug addict turned moralizer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made everything up.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
As opposed to some out there who are contemplating Mr Beck without life…
Mike E
@Just Some Fuckhead: It would be irresponsible not to!
Ija
@mark:
I wouldn’t be surprised if this line of attack comes up in Glenn Beck’s show very soon.
Uloborus
@RossInDetroit:
But like everyone’s said, Beck LOSES them money ALREADY. He’s advertiser poison. And this isn’t new. It’s not like this happened last month and the business end hasn’t figured out what to do about it. As far as direct money is concerned, Beck is the biggest failure FOX could have and always has been.
That’s the biggest argument that Beck is kept entirely because Murdoch uses him to stir up the tea party. He has no other use and never has. From a business standpoint he should have been canned a year ago, no matter what his ratings. Maybe long before that. I don’t remember when this got bad.
t
Fox isn’t a business. It’s a message building propaganda machine. If it turns a profit that’s all well and good for its owners but the financial bottom line really doesn’t matter all that much in the end. The Washington Times lost millions every year but still served its purpose.
4jkb4ia
Nice interview with Richard Freeman on unions and what they do Via Marginal Revolution. Don’t discount it for that–the last statement is that Walker should pay attention to John Howard, the last person in the West who tried to delegitimize unions, and who was ignominiously thrown out of office. (This may have had something to do with Iraq, too…)
Charles Blow had a fit of having a decent graphic last week. Even Tea Party members are less likely in the poll he used to say that they were angry with the government, although this is probably because the government hasn’t done much of anything since January. The people who are angry with the government are Glenn Beck’s audience.
Mike E
@geg6:
I say he stays by seamlessly switching allegiance to whomever The Big Guy tells him to flack for. And by seamless, I mean it’ll be as subtle as Bobby Ewing suddenly showing up in Pam’s shower. We’re talking good teevee, dammit!
Jim, Once
@PaulW: I presume you’ve tried the discussion boards on Amazon? I download from those a lot.
4jkb4ia
Also, too, the House freshmen can speak for these people who are angry with the government without the conspiracy theories.
The Moar You Know
@t: I disagree, but only slightly. Fox is a business, but its currency is not money; it is mindshare. It needs money to keep going, but they have plenty of that from their network arm, as well as private investment (you gotta wonder why the Saudis are so sunk into them). They could keep broadcasting until the sun goes out.
If you look at it that way, Beck is one of their bestselling products.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale: I think there’s a lot to this, and it makes me wonder which GOP candidate Fox will be backing next year. Their candidate last time around, as Zifnab mentioned above, was Giuliani, right? And he imploded. On top of that, their Tea Party adventure hasn’t exactly turned out to be the nation-sweeper/ratings-buster I’m sure they were hoping for. Instead, it’s turned out to be the GOP’s small, hard core of loons, racists, and sore losers the rest of us always knew they were. And this is even with the rest of the news media taking them far more seriously than they deserve. On top of everything, some of their pet issues are meeting with pushback, as can be seen in Wisconsin and Ohio.
So, like you say, it behooves them to dial back on the crazy. And maybe they’ve learned something about handling the dynamics of a factionalized primary series. In 2008, a relatively moderate GOP candidate pretty much defaulted into the nomination, since the racists voted for their favorites, the holy rollers voted for theirs, the plutocrats voted for theirs, etc. and McCain happened to end up with the most delegates. Maybe this time around there will be more coordination with the GOP leadership, and we’ll end up with Fox, Limbaugh, the Kochs, and whatever actual politicians are put up to look like they’re running the GOP campaign all backing some McCain look-alike, whether it’s Romney, Thune, or some other empty suit/head with a reasonably pretty white face, and possibly waiting until after the primaries have heated up, to get some idea of which way the electoral wind seems to be blowing.
Where this all leaves Beck I’m sure will depend on how willing he is to play ball. If the GOP decides that 2012 is a lost cause, Beck will probably have a little more leeway. If the GOP decides it’s a real horse race, however, Fox probably won’t have much room for a loose cannon on its decks at all.
Mike in NC
@t:
Isn’t this also the case with The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and assorted other propaganda tools? They may consistently lose money but somebody is there to foot the bill for what they want published.
negative 1
I hate to sound negative – oh, wait, the name, well… – but at most if the fox train derails then the most anyone could hope for is a new head of the news department. Fox can then spin it that they have ‘a new standard for reporting’ and those that survive any surface restructurings (Bill, Hannity, probably Shep Smith) will have an elder statesman appeal (i.e., they always reported the truth, even when it was unpopular at fox).
Waiting for people to wake up regarding fox’s propaganda is a losing battle. The system is broken. I honestly don’t have an idea about how to fix it. Corporate $ will always trump all, and since they own the broadcasters, they will broadcast in their own (republican) interests. I do know, however, that even if fox was bankrupt tomorrow something new would fill that niche.
Marmot
@geg6:
I think you’re neglecting the viewer-magnet effect that Beck has, regardless of how much ad money he can pull in directly. I mean, tons of crazy conservatives tune in for the Beck, but stay for the rest of the programming.
Southern Beale
@bemused:
They’ll just listen to him on the radio. And read his books. And watch his DVDs. It’s not like you can’t always find these assholes spewing their crap somewhere. As long as there’s money to be made there will be a venue.
Mike E
@Marmot:
Yeah, The Clapper can’t change channels
mikefromArlington
Mid terms have plenty of room for the crazies. It’s when elections go national that the crazy takes a back seat.
See, now the GOP has to give an impression of being mentally stable so their base is going to be ignored for a while.
Maude
@Southern Beale:
Beck is losing radio audience numbers. He’s off in NYC and Philly.
Southern Beale
@Maude:
Liberal urban areas! He’s on in “real America” trust me. These people don’t go away, ever. Once the 2012 presidential election is over Beck will be useful again. If Obama wins in 2012 and/or the Democrats take back the House or increase their margin in the senate, Beck will be even MORE useful. He is the mechanism for whipping up the base. Right now the base is whipped and ready to go. They need to look more reasonable now and Beck doesn’t serve that purpose. When they need to turn out a bunch of senior citizens in their Hoverounds, Beck will back.
TooManyJens
Michelle Malkin’s cousin is missing: http://michellemalkin.com/2011/03/07/missing-marizela-perez/
It sounds pretty scary. I hope they find her safe and sound.
PaulW
@Just Some Fuckhead:
The wingnut himself/herself may not reach peak wingnut. But there IS a point where the other wingnuts won’t follow because will have enough brain cells to think “Wait, we go there and we’ll lose voters.”
Beck will most likely keep going off the charts as best he can. But he’s going to lose more people as he does… It’s happening now if there’s rumblings like this among the Far Right…
different church-lady
@PaulW:
I’m just hoping, for Beck’s sake, that FNC doesn’t engage in the same kind of decision making that UBS did.
PaulW
@Jim, Once:
I didn’t think of that. Thank you.
bemused
@Southern Beale:
True although many senior citizens are sure to have a big sad if they can’t see Beck’s nifty blackboard presentations on their tvs every night and DVD’s cost money!
Svensker
@PaulW:
May I make a suggestion? You comment here fairly regularly. When you mentioned an e-book I got curious and clicked on your name/link. But it was REAL hard to find anything about your book. Maybe first advertisement would be to have the book featured prominently on your blog with an easily findable link to see some samples and be able to buy? Since you seem to blog about politics and it doesn’t seem your stories are about politics, a bit a sample would be helpful.
Just some thoughts.
Good luck!
Uncle Clarence Thomas
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Glenn Beck is a two-bit liar. Here’s a consummate pro:
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Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@Uloborus:
He has no other use and never has.
Well, he could be converted into biodiesel.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“The younger demo, which Beck is losing fastest, is the most desirable to advertisers. ”
Hey, but not the goldbug merchants.
Anyway, doesn’t Murdoch’s son and heir apparent hate Ailes and hate the crappy faux-journalism that Fox produces? I thought that Ailes would only be in charge of Fox as long as Murdoch pere is in still in charge of the parent company.
Or has Murdoch’s buying up his daughter’s TV production company changed the succession plan?