Where Glenn Beck Came From

Beck, meanwhile, Beck unplugs 'hotline to White House'

(NEWSER) - Glenn Beck's radio show is currently without a home in New York after having been dropped by WOR, one of the city's biggest talk radio stations. "The reason is ratings," WOR's program director tells the New York Daily News. "Somewhat to our surprise, the show wasn't getting what we wanted." The station plans to replace him with another conservative, Mike Gallagher, a New Yorker whom they hope will have more to say about local issues. More»

Plus, Fox News host is now traveling with an armed guard

(NEWSER) - Glenn Beck’s latest metaphor: Progressives are like slave owners. He came up with this one last night while bemoaning the thousands of people in Detroit who lined up to apply for, as he called it, “free government money that we don’t know where it came from,” Gawker reports. He led off his report by explaining that progressives, who are “chipping away at your individual freedoms,” used to be called tyrants. More»

Logic-defying conspiracy theories jump from the fringe to the mainstream

(NEWSER) - The paranoid fringe of the American right has become mainstream to an extent unthinkable even when the John Birch Society was at its peak, writes Thomas Frank. Historian Richard Hofstadter's landmark 1965 The Paranoid Style in American Politics seems more relevant than ever, Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal. The difference now is that the conspiracy theorists aren't handing out flyers on street corners any more—they're on Fox News ranting about birth certificates and creeping Communism, he notes. More»

(NEWSER) - Time hits newsstands tomorrow with a familiar face on the cover and the question, "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?" But instead of a hit piece, the article itself offers a fairly benign profile of "the pudgy, buzz-cut, weeping phenomenon of radio, TV and books." Limbaugh and Hannity are still juggernauts, "but it is Beck—nervous, beset, desperate—who now channels the mood of many on the right," writes David Von Drehle. "He is the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right. A gifted entrepreneur of angst in a white-hot market." 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»