Paranoid 'Pseudocons' Hijacking Right

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»

Other media outlets need to highlight 'propaganda:' Boehlert

(NEWSER) - “Fox News has exited the journalism community this year,” Eric Boehlert writes. “It's a purely political player,” which would be all well and good if other media outlets would just report that. As it stands, Fox goes happily about its “propaganda” while hiding behind the “façade of journalism,” created by the real press. Journalists are starting to call out the organization as an “opposition party,” but too many “naively” uphold a “gentleman’s agreement” whose time is long passed. More»

Talk-show host developed style from 26 years in radio

(NEWSER) - One could be forgiven for thinking that Glenn Beck emerged, fully formed, from some radio talk-show host birthing chamber. But the Beck of today was once a pot-smoking teen from a broken home in Washington who considered suicide, a Salon profile reveals. Beck would later clash with Mormons at an early radio gig in Provo, Utah, deriding his religious co-workers as “freaks.” 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»

(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»