Once Fox New's biggest ratings getter, Glenn Beck, like a car  on its last few gallons of gasoline, may have reached the end of the line. As of this past January, his ratings suffered a 39% drop, year to year, averaging a paltry 1.8 million daily viewers last month. Even worse, in the key demographic of  25-54 year-olds,  he captured only 397,000 on his daily Fox News Network show.  He is in serious danger of being, to be charitable, marginalized. He is already inconsequential as an opinionator, and even among his own Fox colleagues, one senses a distancing, a certain pulling down of a gauzy curtain as his daily ranting about the impending end of America oozes, like stinky puss, from a gas filled, decomposing corpse.  One wonders why his bosses, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, keep him around, as certainly he is not making much money for the network, at least not nearly as much as his prime time colleague, Bill O’Reilly. Mainstream brand advertisers have deserted him like he has the plague. Beck  has reputed lost a third of them.

Beck’s decline is classic. A quick view of his career, if looked at from a proper distance, will quickly reveal that he is no different than the subjects of novels (like “Elmer Gantry”) and movies (like “A Face in the Crowd”) which recall Lincoln’s famous adage that “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  And like the fictional subjects, Beck’s utterances have become increasingly outlandish and irrational as his show sinks in viewership.

One can only be reminded of the fortunes of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, who separated himself from the conservative herd by holding up a list of “known communists” in the State Department yet in a few years crashed and burned (after having destroyed the lives of some of our best artists and professionals) when he accused the United States Army command itself of being communists. Sooner or later even the most ignorant must abandon charlatans.

Beck’s rise to national prominence followed an age old media path.. His schtick was in shocking his audience. His ‘”Morning Zoo” partner in Phoenix, Tim Hatrick, described him thusly:  “...he was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the bushes for attention." By his  own admission, from the age of 16 to 31 years old, Beck was high on alcohol, cocaine, or grass every day while broadcasting. Nevertheless, the formula worked. (He even got Sen. Joe Lieberman to write him a reference letter to gain admission into Yale as a divinity student. He lasted less than one semester.) He soon was the toast of  talk radio in The Big Apple, from which he was catapulted into television, first with CNN and now with Fox.

The rest is history. A detailed recitation of Beck’s biography is not intended here; but Beck has gotten more ink, principally from the liberal blogosphere, print and television media (notably MSNBC, which company has boosted its own ratings largely due to exposing Beck’s outrageousness) and throughout most of 2008 and 2009 he was the subject of more commentary than perhaps even Sarah Palin. In early 2010 he reached his apex but since then his brand has faltered mightily. It is very possible, even likely, that he has seen his day.

In the 1930’s, in the depth of the Depression,  the first of the great radio hate mongers Detroit’s own anti-Semitic priest, Father  Charles E. Coughlin, ultimately withered away into unimportance as the economy picked up (though it took FDR and his bishop to shut him down).  The one common thread Beck has with all of his populist predecessors  is his need to generate shock and awe with his audience. The progressively more irrational content of Beck’s program shows that he is either becoming unhinged or is searching anywhere for a much needed ratings bounce. And, just like Coughlin, it is the economy which will push Beck aside. Americans’ inbred optimism will prevail as we dig our way out of the 2008 depression.

Among Beck’s more redoubtable recent  pronouncements:  he has admitted that he could shoot Michael Moore to death; that President Obama, who describes himself as a black man, is a racist; that philanthropist and liberal activist George Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, profitted from sending Jews to their deaths; and just a couple of days ago he tagged the uprising in Egypt as the beginning of the restoration of the Medieval Caliphate in the Middle East.

Beck has seriously lost his way as a broadcaster, if he ever had one, and more likely as a sane human being. His daily chalk talks, which harken back to the televised religious tracts of the late Rev. Gene Scott in Los Angeles, have become nearly unintelligible, if not comedic,  in their presentation. It may be that Beck, who has garnered a fortune for himself, may go off the deep end not for the potential loss of income, but because the hubris which seems to inevitably follow nothing-to-something fame, has made his loss of an audience more than he can handle. 

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