Fox Isn't Flag-Waving, Just Angry

(NEWSER) - With the election season winding down and the economy slumping, Fox News could have trouble paying the heavy hitters it's signed and re-signed to multimillion-dollar contracts, the New York Times reports. Experts agree that advertising, a big chunk of Fox’s budget, will fall off after the amazing expenditures during viewer-magnet election coverage. Whether the outcome of the vote will matter is another question entirely. More»

Top Republicans complain talkers are pushing party to fringe

(NEWSER) - Top Republicans are fed up with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh—off the record at least. Without naming names, Politico says that “congressional leaders” privately complain that the conservative commentariat is hurting their chances in 2010 by pushing the party too far to the fringe. Operatives close to top 2012 presidential contenders say they’d like to harness the grass-roots anger against Barack Obama, but worry about seeming too extreme. More»

Birthers, Limbaugh, Beck fill vacuum as Obama tries to stay above the fray

(NEWSER) - As recently as this spring, the Tea Party movement seemed anemic and wonky. But in the months that followed, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and others whipped the right-wing fringe into such a frenzy that a “separate reality grew like a second head on the American polity,” Philip Weiss writes in a New York magazine deconstruction of the anti-Obama movement. Nobody gets off easy: "I blame the whole birther movement on bad PR by the Obama campaign," says a veteran journalist. "They really bungled it." More»

Six more firms to refuse to run ads on host's show

(NEWSER) - The audience for Glenn Beck’s Fox News show continues to swell even as more advertisers decline to run commercials on the program in the wake of the talk-show host's assertion that President Obama is a racist, the Los Angeles Times reports. Beck’s Monday night show attracted 2.81 million viewers, his third-largest audience to date, and Tuesday’s segment drew 2.7 million. More»

Son of great conservative thinks Limbaugh's a bit de trop

(NEWSER) - Christopher Buckley, having been savaged by Rush Limbaugh for endorsing Barack Obama, fires back at the talk-show host for daring to think he can assume the conservative mantle of his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr. Writing in the Daily Beast, Buckley brandishes French, that tool of the “card-carrying member of the Eastern seaboard, proletarian-despising media elite” in pronouncing Limbaugh “de trop”—"a bit much." More»