The Washington Post reports:
Glenn Beck and Fox News Channel formally agreed Wednesday to end Beck’s daily program, which will dissolve a 27-month marriage beset by outside pressures and internal tensions sometime this year.
The conservative host and the news channel, started by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch as an avowed counterweight to the liberal news media, agreed that they could not agree to continue, but neither side blamed the other or disclosed who was at fault. Beck will “transition” off Fox sometime this year, Fox and Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts, said jointly.
I love that use of the word “transition.”
Beck’s program has remained a solid draw for Fox despite a gradual slide in the ratings from its mid-2009 peak [about 3 million viewers]. Airing at 5 p.m., a period when fewer people are watching TV than during evening prime-time hours, “Glenn Beck” still draws more than 2 million viewers, making it one of the top attractions on a cable news channel.
As Dana Milbank writes at The Post, Beck has gone beyond the pugnacious but more-or-less reality-based conservatism of Fox’s Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, and increasingly ventured into conspiracy-loon territory.
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.”
Griffin’s Web site dabbles in a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his view that “present-day political Zionists are promoting the New World Order.”
Shades of Gilad Atzmon. I suspect Beck may have become even too embarrassing for Sarah Palin, who was pleased to join him for his rally to “restore America’s honor” less than a year ago. Of course we haven’t heard much about Palin herself recently, as influential conservatives back away from her and it seems increasingly unlikely that she will seek the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination.
