Glenn Dreck hates Gentiles, as he and his LDS-brethren characterize non-Mormons. That means that Dreck hates 98% of the people in the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Stupid. What is truly stupid is that the majority of the loons who watch/listen to Dreck for the "news & opinion" are giving their rapt, drooling attention to a guy who hates them. If this is a (fair & balanced) request for an anti-nausea prescription, so be it.
PS: For more on Dreck's LSD-, er, LDS-fantasies, click here.
[x NY Fishwrap Zine]
Being Glenn Beck
By Mark Leibovich
Tag Cloud of the following article
Glenn Beck was sprawled out on his office couch a couple of weeks ago, taking — as self-helpers like to say — an inventory. “I think what the country is going through right now is, in a way, what I went through with my alcoholism,” he told me. “You can either live or die. You have a choice.” Beck, who is 46, was in the Midtown Manhattan offices of his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, which is named for Mercury Theater, the company created by Orson Welles. He had just finished his three-hour syndicated radio show and was a few hours away from his television show. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of September, and Beck had just returned from a week’s vacation in the Grand Tetons followed by a quick hop to Anchorage, where he and Sarah Palin appeared at an event on September 11.
Beck has a square, boyish face, an alternately plagued and twinkle-eyed demeanor that conjures (when Beck is wearing glasses) the comedian Drew Carey. He is 6-foot-2, which is slightly jarring when you first meet him, because he is all head and doughiness on television; I never thought of Beck as big or small, just as someone who was suddenly ubiquitous and who talked a lot and said some really astonishing things, to a point where it made you wonder — constantly — whether he was being serious.
At some point in the past few months, Beck ceased being just the guy who cries a lot on Fox News or a “rodeo clown” (as he has described himself) or simply a voice of the ultraconservative opposition to President Obama. In record time, Beck has traveled the loop of curiosity to ratings bonanza to self-parody to sage. It is remarkable to think he has been on Fox News only since January 2009.
In person, Beck is sheepish and approachable, betraying none of the grandiosity or bluster you might expect from a man who predicted “the next Great Awakening” to a few hundred thousand people in late August at the Lincoln Memorial or who declared last year that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” He wore a blue dress shirt tucked into jeans and brown loafers, which he kicked off as soon as he sat down. He showed little interest in the results from primary elections held the day before — upsets in Delaware and New York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective presidential ticket in 2012.
“Not involved with the Tea Party,” Beck told me, shrugging. While many identify Beck with a political insurgency — as Rush Limbaugh was identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 — to believe that the nation suffers from “a political problem” comically understates things, in his view. “I stand with the Tea Party as long as they stand for certain principles and values,” Beck told me. He is a principles-and-values guy.
Beck talks like someone who is accustomed to thinking out loud and inflicting his revelations in real time. He speaks in the language of therapy, in which he has been steeped through years of 12-step programs and the Mormon-affiliated addiction-treatment center he and his wife run in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region. As he lay on his office couch, he recalled a very low moment. It was back in the mid-1990s. He was newly divorced, lying on the olive green shag carpet of a two-bedroom apartment in Hamden, Conn., that smelled like soup. It had a tiny kitchen, and his young children slept in a bed together when they visited on weekends. “It was the kind of place where loser guys who just got divorced wind up,” Beck said. “You’d see a new guy come in, you’d say hello and he’d walk in alone, and you’d be like, ‘Yeah, I understand, brother.’ ”
Beck understands, brother. Communists in the White House are bent on “fundamentally transforming” the country; progressives speak of putting “the common good” before the individual, which “is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany,” as he said on his show in May. Or, as he said in July of last year, “Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill,” is “driven by President Obama’s thinking on . . . reparations” and his desire to “settle old racial scores.” It sounds harsh, maybe, but this is the rhetoric of crisis and desperation, and so much of the population is too blind drunk to recognize the reality — which is that the country is lying on an olive green shag carpet on the brink of ending it all. “Some have to destroy their family and their job and their house and their income,” Beck told me. “Some don’t get it, and they die.”
Some do get it, and they revere Glenn Beck.
While the Right has traditionally responded to its aggrieved sense of alienation with anger, Beck is not particularly angry. He seems sorrowful; his prevailing message is umbrage born of self-taught wisdom. He is more agonized than mad. He is post-angry.
Beck rarely speaks with the squinty-eyed certainty or smugness of Rush Limbaugh or his fellow Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. He often changes his mind or nakedly contradicts himself. “When you listen and watch me, it’s where I am in my thinking in the moment,” Beck told me. “I’m trying to figure it out as I go.” He will sometimes stop midsentence and recognize that something he is about to say could be misunderstood and could cause him trouble. Then, more often than not, he will say it anyway.
In the middle of his analogy to me about his own personal crash and the country’s need to heal itself, Beck looked at his publicist with a flash of alarm about how I might construe what he was saying. “He is going to write a story that I believe the whole country is alcoholics,” he said. And then he went on to essentially compare his “Restoring Honor” pageant at the Lincoln Memorial to a large-scale A.A. meeting. “When I bottomed out, I couldn’t put it back together myself,” Beck told me. “I could do all the hard work. I could do the 12 steps. But I needed like-minded people around me.”
He needed support, just as responsible Americans need it now to reinforce the principles and values that the founders instilled and that, he says, have since decayed. “You need people to be able to reach out and connect and say, ‘Let me help hold you when you’re stumbling, and you hold me when I’m stumbling, because what we’re going through now is a storm of confusion.’ ” Fans approach Beck and give him hugs. Do people feel they can hug Limbaugh?
There is something feminine about Beck — the soft features, the crying on the air, the reflexive vulnerability. It sets him apart from the standard, testosterone-addled rant artists of cable and talk radio. Women tune into Beck’s radio show more heavily than they do to other conservative commentators, says Chris Balfe, the president and chief operating officer of Mercury, which employs more than 40 people. And Beck’s television show is on at 5 p.m. Eastern, traditionally a slot with more women viewers. (On a typical day, Beck’s show is recorded on more DVRs than any other cable-news program.) But Beck also appeals to a more traditionally female sensibility. “He works through things in real time,” Balfe told me. “Maybe he’ll come back tomorrow and say, ‘You know what, I’ve given this some thought, and here’s what I’m thinking now.’ ” Or maybe he’ll come back sooner. Within a few sentences of proposing Obama’s “deep-seated hatred for white people,” he added this caveat: “I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.”
Beck’s staff and loyalists love to compare Beck with Oprah Winfrey. Balfe was the first to say it to me, adding the requisite faux apology. As Winfrey does, Beck talks a great deal about himself and subscribes to the pop-recovery ethic. “Part of Oprah’s appeal is that people see her as a real person,” says Joel Cheatwood, the Fox executive who initially brought Beck to CNN’s Headline News and then to Fox. “She has struggled with her weight; she is open about it. Glenn is not a pretty boy. He comes off as a regular guy who has also been open about his struggles.” (Beck dabbled in Pilates recently, he disclosed on radio.)
The presumed Oprah parallel is corporate as well as stylistic. Beck, like Winfrey, has a knack for making best sellers of books he mentions on the air. He publishes a magazine, sells more than a million dollars in merchandise and speaks of an array of possible multimedia ventures. Beck’s magazine, Fusion, is so named because it is a “fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.” Beck himself is a study in fusions. He blends TV-ready empathy with push-the-edge conservative talk, as well as self-doubt with the self-absorbed grandeur of a man whose hard-won recovery grants him the power to speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Beck is constantly admitting his weaknesses and failures, which he wields as both a crutch and a shield. “Maybe Glenn’s transparency is what keeps him out of trouble,” says Robert Beath, Beck’s drama teacher at Sehome High School in Bellingham, Wash. Beath, who was fond of Beck as a teenager, said Beck appears to now think that his revelations grant him license. “When he says, ‘I am not perfect,’ he seems to escape accountability for his various points of view. Yet he expects others to be accountable for their point of view without seeming to allow them the ‘I am not perfect’ exception.”
That’s where the Winfrey comparison falls apart. You could never imagine her joking about poisoning the speaker of the house or talking about choking the life out of a filmmaker or fantasizing about beating a congressman “to death with a shovel” (as Beck did for Nancy Pelosi, Michael Moore and Charles Rangel, respectively). Beck is divisive.
“He has a spiritual connection to us; you can hear his heart speaking,” Susan Trevethan, a psychiatric nurse from Milford, CT, told me at the “Restoring Honor” rally. “I believe he has been divinely guided to be here in this place,” she said. “He is doing the research. He is teaching us.”
Or if you prefer: “Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted Cassandra,” wrote The Buffalo Beast, in naming Beck one of the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2006. (No. 24 then, but in January he made it to No. 1.) “It’s like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave him a show.”
O.K., the dude’s polarizing. Got it.
The Mercury Radio Arts headquarters are a museum to Beck’s quirks, aspirations, successes and self. Poster-size color photos of Beck, taken by his personal photographer, George Lange, dominate the lobby. One features Beck wrapped up head to toe in yellow police tape; another has him dressed and made up like a rodeo clown. The offices evoke the self-image of a multimedia entrepreneur and would-be titan: portraits of Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney hang on the walls. Balfe, the chief executive, keeps a massive red-and-blue “Capitalism” poster above his desk — hand-painted by Beck.
Next door to Balfe’s office is Beck’s, which is spacious, sun-filled and arrayed with family photos, books and a yellowed copy of The Boston Post with the headline “Woodrow Wilson Is Dead.” His computer flashes with alternating screen savers of his second wife, Tania, and his four children — two from each marriage — along with photos of landmarks like Pike Place Market in Seattle, near where Beck grew up.
Beck can be difficult to get to. He is acutely conscious of his personal safety. He feels targeted. Security guards trail him on the street. He wears bulletproof vests at public events. He wanted to build a six-foot barrier around his estate in New Canaan, CT, running him afoul of local zoning ordinances. The barrier would not stop those who would do him harm, Beck’s lawyer told New Canaan’s zoning commission, but it would slow them down. “It will stop anything people send into the property, whether photographs or bullets,” the lawyer said, according to The New Canaan Advertiser.
Beck says he trusts very few people. He gives few interviews. I first spoke to him by phone, a few days after the rally in Washington. He sounded thrilled — on the phone, as he did on the air that week — with how everything went on August 28. But he never seems far from the precipice of something. It is all precarious.
“I said to someone the other day,” Beck told me, “I am as close today to a complete and total collapse as I was on the first day of recovery.” He calls himself a “recovering dirtbag.” There were many days, he said, when he would avoid the bathroom mirror so he would not have to face himself. He was in therapy with “Dr. Jack Daniels.” He smoked marijuana every day for about 15 years. He fired an underling for bringing him the wrong pen. And, according to a Salon.com report, he once called the wife of a radio rival to ridicule her — on the air — about her recent miscarriage.
“You get to a place where you disgust yourself,” Beck told me. “Where you realize what a weak, pathetic and despicable person you have become.”
Beck grew up in Mount Vernon, Wash., about 50 miles north of Seattle. He was an unfocused student with discrete passions and talents who could have benefited from a more stable home environment — and a prescription for Ritalin. His love affair with radio began, he says, when his mother gave him an album set of radio classics that included Welles’s “War of the Worlds.” He was 8 and spent much of his free time honing his radio voice into a tape recorder.
Bill and Mary Beck, Glenn’s parents, owned a bakery in Mount Vernon that eventually closed. The couple divorced when Glenn was 13, and Mary Beck, who battled alcoholism, drowned a few years later along with a male companion on a boating expedition in 1979 on a bay near Tacoma. Beck deemed her death a suicide (though local newspapers and government records called it an accident, according to Salon.com’s Alexander Zaitchik). Beck was 15 then, and he says the episode sank him into decades of misery, chemical dependence and misanthropic behavior that played out on and off the air at a procession of FM stations across the country — morning-D.J. jobs in markets like Provo, UT; Phoenix; Corpus Christi, TX; and New Haven, where he hit bottom.
I asked Beck if he could pinpoint the moment he decided to change his life. “Here’s something I haven’t told anyone before,” Beck said. “When my mother was at her worst, she was dating a guy who was abusive. He was a big Navy guy too.” It was right at the end of her life. Glenn got between his mother and the man during an ugly fight. “I just came in and stood between them and said, ‘Get out of our house.’ ” The man left, but he came back a few days later and begged forgiveness. “When I sobered up, I remember looking back to that point,” Beck told me. “Something I learned still kind of plays a role.” He went on to say: “One of the phrases I use is: You need to be who you were born to be, not the people we have allowed ourselves to become. Don’t let life and the world shape us. That’s not who we are.”
I asked Beck how he knew that his mother’s death was a suicide. The man who drowned with her was that same abusive boyfriend, he said. Either the two of them jumped overboard at the same time, or Mary fell in and the Navy man jumped in to save her — and that was unlikely. Why? Beck said he been out on a boat with the boyfriend before, and the man preached to him never to jump in and save somebody who is drowning. It only endangers the would-be rescuer. Throw in a life preserver instead. Plus, the Navy man’s clothes were found neatly folded, along with his wallet and watch.
At just 21, Beck took a job as a morning-drive impresario in Louisville. His show, “Captain Beck and the A-Team,” included the usual antics of the genre: juvenile jokes, pranks, impersonations, sound effects and fat jokes about a news reader for a rival station — anything to fill the four hours.
By most accounts, Beck succeeded; but by his own, he was miserable. “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Ky., that had my name on it,” Beck wrote in his 2003 book, Real America: Messages From the Heart and Heartland. “Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 m.p.h. into that bridge abutment.” He says he contemplated only violent suicides (“like the bridge abutment thing and putting a gun in my mouth while listening to Nirvana”). He attributes his inability to off himself to cowardice and stupidity — qualities that also suited him to his tour of Morning Zoo America. “I hated people,” Beck wrote, waxing pop-psychological, “because I hated myself.”
By the mid-’90s, Beck had been married, divorced, pony tailed and seemingly at a dead end. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, reluctantly attending his first meetings in a church basement in Cheshire, CT. The olive-green-carpet episode was formative but not a singular turning point. “It was more a point of recognition,” Beck told me. “Are you going to stand or are you going to grow up? Are you going to succeed or fail, live or die? What is it going to be? There weren’t any angels or the sky opening up.” He embarked on a period of “searching” and self-education. The process was largely haphazard. He tells of walking into a bookstore and loading up on books by a hodgepodge that included Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Carl Sagan, Nietzsche, Billy Graham and Adolf Hitler. “The library of a serial killer,” he called it. He even enrolled at Yale, with a written recommendation from an alum who was a listener at the time, Senator Joe Lieberman. He took one class, early Christology, but says he “spent more time trying to find a parking space” than in class and quickly dropped out.
Beck met Tania in 1998. She walked into the New Haven radio station where he was working to pick up a Sony Walkman she won in a contest. They began dating. He wanted to marry, and she agreed, but only on the condition that they find a religion together. They shopped around, attended services and eventually settled on Mormonism — inspired in part by Beck’s best friend and radio sidekick, Pat Gray, who himself is Mormon. Beck, who was brought up Roman Catholic, has called his faith “the most important thing” in his life.
By the late 1990s, Beck had come to despise the FM zoo format. He was becoming more spiritual, more engaged in news and current affairs and more opinionated on the air about his political views (generally conservative then, though not as much as now — he favored abortion rights at the time). He was a connoisseur of talk radio and yearned to break into the genre.
Beck moved to Tampa, Fla., in late 1999 — leaving his two daughters back in Connecticut — to host his first talk-radio show, an afternoon slot on WFLA. “I may have made the biggest mistake of my life in taking this job,” Beck recalls saying during his first segment on the air. “Because I’ve just made a pact that I was going to leave my children in Connecticut and move to Florida, and it’s killing me. I may have traded my children for this job.”
Beck’s radio show was heavily political but not exclusively. It was more stream of consciousness — veering in unforeseen directions, as reflected in the first segment. “I found it to be a very ‘Seinfeld’-like radio program,” says Kraig Kitchin, the former president of Premiere Radio Networks, who signed Beck to a national-syndication deal. “There was one main plot streaming through the program and two or three subplots.”
Joel Cheatwood, then the executive director of program development for CNN and Headline News, heard Beck’s radio show in late 2004, when Beck was on the air in Philadelphia, and said he believed that the host could translate to television. Cheatwood, a controversial innovator of television news, pioneered the flashy “if it bleeds, it leads” local-news formats. He persuaded Beck to join Headline News in 2006. As with his first stint in Tampa, Beck had early doubts. “Glenn had been on the air for about three weeks,” recalled Cheatwood, who has one of the most thrillingly sculptured waves of slicked-back hair I have ever seen. “He came into my office and said something like, ‘This is kind of a disaster,’ and he was right.” Beck struggled to adapt his radio persona to the regimented bites of television. “It was all over the board,” Cheatwood says of the early Headline News show.
Beck compares his free-associative radio orientation to the real-time oversharing ethic of today’s culture. “My life is what I think our children are going though with Facebook,” he told me. “They’re putting things up there, because they’re living their life, and everybody’s doing it.” Eventually Beck learned to harness his talent to the demands of television, at least somewhat. His best-known episode at Headline News was a November 2006 interview with Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, who had just become the first Muslim elected to the House. “I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you,” Beck told Ellison to break the ice. “Because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Groups complained, Beck expressed regret for “a poorly worded question” and Jon Stewart played the clip on “The Daily Show.” “Finally,” Stewart said, “a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking.”
Beck was lured to Fox News by the prospect of more viewers and a recruiting pitch by Cheatwood — who had since moved there — and the network’s president, Roger Ailes. He began his Fox News show the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration.
People watch Beck in remarkable numbers, at least by the standards of his time slot on cable news — he averages more than two million viewers, whether the topic is a founding father, an obscure president or a little-known White House administrator.
“If you were in an imaginary meeting for a TV show,” Bill Shine, Fox News’s programming director, says, “and someone said: ‘I have an idea. Let’s spend a month talking about the founding fathers and get a bunch of pictures of Benjamin Franklin and hang them up,’ you’d be like, ‘What?’ But it works.” Beck fashions himself a kind of self-teaching populist for the Internet age. His characteristic chalkboard lends his show an air of retro-professorial authority, despite the fact that Beck did not attend college and says that before Sept. 11, 2001, “I didn’t know my butt from my elbow.” He recommends books. He recently started “Glenn Beck University,” a special collection of “classes” on GlennBeck.com to go with Beck’s daily tutorials. Pat Gray said Beck was “America’s history professor.”
“Beck offers a story about the American past for people who are feeling right now very angry and alienated,” says David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and editor of the conservative Web site Frum Forum. “It is different enough from the usual story in that he makes them feel like they’ve got access to secret knowledge.”
Beck’s Fox News show intersperses history with weeping laments, melodramatic calls to faith and vehement attacks on “progressives.” He also mixes in campy stage props and laughs straight from the Morning Zoo playbook. One moment, he is giving an impassioned plea for the would-be builder of Park51 to build elsewhere; the next moment, he is discussing possible names for a hypothetical Islam-friendly gay bar next door (“Turban Cowboy,” “You Mecca Me Hot”).
“I find it riveting to watch,” says Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director whom Beck railed against prodigiously on the air last year after she named Mother Teresa and Mao Zedong as her “favorite political philosophers” (she says she was joking about Mao) in a commencement address. “There is that edge where you are always thinking, Is he going to totally lose it on camera?” Dunn told me.
The ethos of Beck’s program is extreme doom and pessimism. In a lead-in to Beck’s show, Shepard Smith referred to his fellow host’s studio as “the Fear Chamber.” This is another departure from the Limbaugh formula. “Rush is basically of a quite optimistic creed,” Frum says. “It’s the Reagan creed: America’s best days are still to come. If we maintain the free-enterprise system, we’re all going to be richer and more united and stronger. With Beck, there is no optimism.”
On Fox News in early September, Beck stood in a mock doorway painted gold. When the country’s economic system reaches “the point of insanity,” he said, it is wise to invest in gold. “Gold prices are climbing,” Beck said, a point buttressed throughout the hour by advertisements from gold dealers. On the other side of the golden doorway is where things get really scary, he said. Who knows what dark, apocalyptic things are there? “Is it bullets?” Beck wondered. “Is it whiskey? Is it cigarettes?”
Beck often speaks of — and is teased about — his “bunker,” where he will retreat after the social fabric rends and the economic system collapses. Some of his most devoted advertisers include companies that could thrive in a period of total collapse — makers of emergency power generators, for instance, or “survival seeds” (allowing citizens to grow their own food).
I asked Beck if he actually had a bunker. No, he said, there is no bunker. He does keep a great deal of food in reserve, although he says that predates his fear that the world would melt down. Food storage is a tenet of his Mormon faith, he said. It is for when tough times come.
“Am I actively engaged in survival training?” he told me. “No. Should I be? Maybe.”
Beck performs more than 20 live stage shows a year as part of what has become a growing multimedia and merchandising empire that, according to Forbes, earned $35 million between June 2009 and June 2010. At the end of July, I paid $147 for a ticket to see him and Bill O’Reilly perform together at a theater in the round in Westbury, N.Y., on Long Island — part of Beck and O’Reilly’s “Bold and Fresh” tour. The theater drew an orderly suburban procession of khaki-wearing, Camry-driving Caucasians who say they want their country back. The woman next to me complained that her large oil can of Heineken and a pretzel cost $16. Air Supply played there a few days earlier.
Beck and O’Reilly each spoke solo for about 40 minutes, followed by a conversational duet by the two Fox News hosts. The sets mingled stand-up comedy with political rants and, in Beck’s case, a history sermon. It included a call for America to return to the spirit of “divine providence” that the founders intended — before it was perverted by Manifest Destiny in the mid-19th century. “We’ve lost our way since Andrew Jackson,” said Beck, who wore an unlaced pair of black Chuck Taylor sneakers. “Manifest Destiny is ‘Get out of my way, I’m on a mission from God.’ That’s where we went wrong. We must humble ourselves.”
Later, Beck and O’Reilly did a riff about Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, which was being held that night.
“What are the odds of Hillary Clinton inviting me to her daughter’s wedding?” O’Reilly asked Beck.
“What are the odds we have a Communist revolutionary in the White House?” Beck replied, to loud applause.
A recurring theme of the evening was Beck and O’Reilly talking about how despised they are by venomous critics bent on silencing them. Both wear this “constant abuse” as a badge of honor and defiance, although, unlike O’Reilly, Beck will betray vulnerability, even woundedness. “They want to destroy you, get you off the air,” O’Reilly told Beck. “And I want to know if that bothers you?”
“It bothers me when I walk down the street with my children,” Beck said, “and my college-age daughter is holding my hand, and someone says something horribly vicious. And my daughter hears them, cries and says to me, ‘Dad, all I wish is that people will remember that you are a dad occasionally as well.’ ” (This was several weeks after Beck apologized for doing an extended imitation of then-11-year-old Malia Obama on his radio show. “Daddy,” Beck said, mimicking the president’s daughter, “why do you hate black people so much?”)
Beck seemed to draw more fans than O’Reilly, despite O’Reilly’s home-field advantage on his native Long Island. “He is a modern-day prophet doing God’s work,” a man named Lee Hein told me. He resides in Hawaii, where he wakes at 3 a.m. to hear a live stream of Beck’s radio show on the Internet. Hein, a plumbing contractor, recently purchased three copies of Beck’s novel “The Overton Window,” five copies of his book “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense” and three copies of “Arguing With Idiots.” He likes to give the books out to educate his friends.
Several people at Beck’s events described themselves as “students of history” or “historians.” When I asked one if he was affiliated with a school or college, he said: “Yes. Glenn Beck University.”
When Beck meets his fans, he does so with the gusto of a public figure engaging his constituents. People he meets often give him presents and notes. He signs autographs, poses for photos. He has perfected the Everyman shtick that presidential candidates spend years trying to master in places like Iowa. No doubt, someone loyal to Beck will read that and say, ‘No, no, it’s not a shtick.’ Like many famous performers, Beck is described by friends and supplicants as someone who is authentic and real, that what you see is what you get. (It’s usually their public-relations person who says this.)
On the Thursday night before his Saturday bar mitzvah at the Lincoln Memorial, Beck walked around the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in anticipation of a “Divine Destiny” event he would host the next night. “Divine Destiny” featured music, speeches and testimonials from a procession of prominent spiritual teachers — priests, pastors, rabbis, Chuck Norris.
Free tickets to “Divine Destiny” were triple hot, like the concert passes Beck used to give away to the 23rd caller on the Morning Zoo. People lined up outside in hopes of getting tickets. Beck came out to say hello. Tania Beck handed out pizza. Beck wore a blue baseball cap, pink shirt and thick-rimmed glasses. He looked like a square dad checking in on the kids at a sleepover. “Do you smell the pizza?” he asked. People greeted him with shrieks, whoops and gasps.
“Are you the first in line?” Beck asked a man with a crew cut and wispy beard from Fayetteville, AR.
“Yes, sir,” the man said.
Beck had a special prize for the man. “I haven’t given this to anybody,” Beck said. It was a Badge of Merit, an award Beck modeled on the Purple Heart-like token that George Washington bestowed for meritorious conduct (for, say, valor in a war or the commitment required to score free tickets).
Beck hugged his way through the line. People were moved, some tearful. “It’s such an honor,” a woman said softly, hugging him. “God bless you, man,” a guy in a Dallas Cowboys shirt said. “Thank you for giving us a voice,” another woman added.
“We hate Woodrow Wilson,” another woman called out. This is like a secret handshake among Beck followers, who have heard his diatribes about the evils of our 28th president, a father of the Progressive Era. “I hate him,” Beck affirmed for the Woodrow Wilson-hating women at the Kennedy Center. “I hate that guy.”
A mother asked him to pose for a photo with her and her autistic child who, the mother says, watches Beck every day. Like Palin, Beck has a special-needs child — a daughter, Mary, who has cerebral palsy — and he often hears from parents who have dealt with similar circumstances.
Beck then stopped and addressed a section of the line. “Do you guys know what’s going on here tonight?” Beck asked them.
“Magic,” answered a woman in an orange T-shirt. “Miracles.”
“There are 2,400 seats,” Beck explained. “Most of them will be pastors and priests and rabbis. And it’s the beginning.”
He started to cry.
“It’s the beginning of the. . . .” He choked up, making it hard to make out his words.
“It’s going to be neat,” he finally mustered.
Beck seems able to cry on cue. He says he is a softie who is prone to crying during television commercials. He is an emotional person, Balfe says, which speaks to his sincerity and the reason that people are so quick to identify with him.
As Beck worked the Kennedy Center, his every move was captured by a videographer who was with him during his trip to Washington. I watched the intimate event from my desktop — it was linked on GlennBeck.com and available to premium “insider extreme” subscribers ($9.95 a month). It was one of the many times I found myself wondering whether this was real, part of the show or some fusion of both.
On the air and in person, Beck often goes on long stretches that are warm, conciliatory and even plaintive. He says he yearns for the cohesion in the country after Sept. 11, 2001, and will speak in paragraphs that could fit into Barack Obama’s plea for national unity in his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There’s a lot we can disagree on, but our values and principles can unite us,” Beck said from the Lincoln Memorial.
But “standing together” can be a tough sell from someone who is so willing to pick at some of the nation’s most tender scabs. Beck’s statement that the president’s legislative agenda is driven by Obama’s desire for “reparations” and his “desire to settle old racial scores” is hardly a uniting message. While public figures tend to eventually learn (some the hard way) that Nazi, Hitler and Holocaust comparisons inevitably offend a lot of people, Beck seems not to care. In a forthcoming book about Beck, Tears of a Clown, the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck’s Fox News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134 times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8 times.
In his quest to root out progressives, Beck compared himself to Israeli Nazi-hunters. “To the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter,” he vowed on his radio show earlier this year. “I’m going to find these people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes.”
“Raising questions” is Beck’s favorite rhetorical method. Last year during the health care debate, Beck compared Obama’s economic agenda to Nazi Germany — specifically he paralleled the White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” with how Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point. Photos of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin then appeared on screen. “Is this where we’re headed?” Beck asked. He allowed that “I am not predicting that we go down that road.”
President Obama is not a Muslim, Beck has said, correctly. But Beck can’t help wondering aloud on his show: “He needlessly throws his hat into the ring to defend the ground-zero mosque. He hosts Ramadan dinners, which a president can do. But then you just add all of this stuff up — his wife goes against the advice of the advisers, jets to Spain for vacation. What does she do there? She hits up the Alhambra palace mosque. Fine, it’s a tourist attraction. But is there anything more to this? Are they sending messages? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Beck and his friends emphasize that he is driven by principles, not politics. He has been critical of Republicans as well as of Democrats, of George W. Bush as well as of Obama. He says that American citizens who are terrorist suspects should be read their Miranda rights, and he opposes a Constitutional amendment that would ban flag-burning. His friends object to any hint that Beck has merely fashioned his worldview according to a marketplace that rewards shock, chutzpah and discord. “If you know Glenn at all, you know he believes every word of what he says,” Chris Balfe says. “And he believes it down to the core of who he is.”
Beck is also a showman at his core and a workaholic. His insomniac mind spins with ideas for segments and revenue streams (which he will duly e-mail to his staff at 3 in the morning). He sleeps little: three, maybe five hours a night if he is lucky, Beck told me. His Mormonism forbids coffee, but he consumes a lot of Diet Coke and chocolate.
He begins his day with a 7:30 meeting with about six or seven writers, researchers and producers split between the television and radio teams. Beck, who runs the meeting, throws out ideas for the show, and the staff will discuss them. “When he walks in, he has about 60 percent of what he wants to talk about mapped out in his brain,” says Steve Burguiere, a Beck radio sidekick who goes by the name Stu. That, Burguiere says, will form the basic kernel of what he will talk about on the air. I asked Burguiere if Beck worked from a script, which made him chuckle. “If we could only get him to work from a script,” he said.
Beck is a strenuous cross-promoter. He spoke constantly on the air about his Washington rally before and after the event. He invites viewers and listeners to visit his Web site and, better yet, the Glenn Beck Store (“Restoring Honor” photograph books can be preordered for $35) and become an “insider extreme” member for premium video and audio links. He recently started a new Web site, the Blaze, which he also mentions on his television and radio shows.
The cross-promotion can be a sore spot at Fox News, particularly for its president, Roger Ailes, who has complained about Beck’s hawking his non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show. Ailes has communicated this to Beck himself and through intermediaries. It goes to a larger tension between Fox News and Beck in what has been a mutually beneficial relationship. Ailes, a former Republican media guru, runs his top-rated cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign, speaking with a single voice and — ideally — for the benefit solely of Fox News’s bottom line.
To some degree, all of Fox News’s top opinion personalities have side ventures — speeches, books, radio — that can invite static from the network. In April, for instance, Fox News bosses vetoed a planned appearance by Hannity at a fund-raiser for a Tea Party group in Cincinnati. But more than any other person at Fox News, Beck operates as a stand-alone entity. He is the only major personality at the network whose office is not at Fox News headquarters in the News Corp building (Mercury is a few blocks down Sixth Avenue). He employs his own publicist, Matthew Hiltzik, a communications consultant who is the son of Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik. Beck receives a $2.5 million salary from Fox News, which bumps to $2.7 million next year, the last of the contract. It is a small fraction of Beck’s revenues, the bulk of which he brings in from his radio and print deals.
“There is always going to be the person within the organization who may take issue with or doesn’t like the way the network is programming certain things,” says Cheatwood, the Fox News executive who oversees Beck’s show. “I allow for that anywhere. But in terms of the relationship between Fox and Glenn, it’s extremely solid.”
Ailes, who declined to comment for this article, has generally been supportive of Beck. But he has also been vocal around the network about how Beck does not fully appreciate the degree to which Fox News has made him the sensation he has become in recent months. In the days following Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, which by Beck’s estimate drew a half-million people, Ailes told associates that if Beck were still at Headline News, there would have been 30 people on the Mall. Fox News devoted less news coverage to the rally than CNN and MSNBC did, which Beck has pointed out himself on the air.
Off-the-record sniping shoots in both directions. You can view some of this as positioning for what could be a contentious contract negotiation. But the friction is evident in many areas. When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet. Fearful that Beck was becoming the perceived face of Fox News, some network insiders leaked their dissatisfaction in March to The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, a highly unusual breach at a place where complaints of internal strains rarely go public.
While Beck’s personal ventures and exposure have soared this year, his television ratings have declined sharply — perhaps another factor in the network’s impatience. His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck’s show (up from 26 in August 2009). Fox also has a difficult time selling ads on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Fox and Friends” when Beck appears on those shows as a guest. Beck’s show is known in the TV sales world as “empty calories,” meaning he draws great ratings but is toxic for ad sales. If nothing else, I sensed that people around Fox News have grown weary after months of “It’s all about Glenn.” I was sitting with Bill Shine, the director of programming, on the Wednesday after the “Restoring Honor” event, which was held on a Saturday and still drawing analysis in the news media four days later. At the end of a half-hour interview in which Shine spoke well of Beck, a look of slight irritation flashed his face. He shook his head slightly. “The president of the United States ends the war in Iraq,” Shine said, which Obama did the night before in a speech from the Oval Office, “and on Wednesday we’re still talking about Glenn Beck.”
No one seems to quite know what to make of Beck these days. On “Fox News Sunday” the day after the “Restoring Honor” gathering, Chris Wallace asked him, “What are you?”
Beck appears conflicted over whether he wants to be the face of Honor Restored or the voice of a Great American Freakout or whether some fusion of the two is possible. He told me that he has enjoyed himself more since Aug. 28, an event that included no references to contemporary politics. It is not clear if this new tenor is a trend or phase or whether Beck is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. “I’m a work in progress, man,” he told me. “I don’t know how to make this transition.” It has become a nagging preoccupation. “I wrote Sarah Palin a letter last night about 2 in the morning,” Beck said on his radio show in September. “And I said: ‘Sarah, I don’t know if I’m doing more harm or more good. I don’t know anymore.’ ”
Beck has made a determination in recent months, Cheatwood told me. “I think what he’s realizing is you have to be careful not to just be part of the noise. You have to transcend the noise.” In the weeks after the “Restoring Honor” rally, Beck’s Fox News show took a decidedly spiritual, historic and even high-minded tone. But near the end of September, Beck returned to a more accustomed noise level. He railed against the “clear and present danger” of progressive ideology and attacked the Obama administration more savagely than he had in some time, singling out Cass Sunstein, the White House’s regulatory czar, as “the most dangerous man in America.”
On Sept. 11, I traveled to Anchorage to watch Beck and Palin perform together at a downtown civic center. A woman outside carried a sign calling Beck and Palin “the dream team,” while another dismissed them as “lipstick and dipstick.”
The crowd was loud and even festive, despite the somber anniversary. Palin spoke first and then introduced Beck. The pair stage-chatted for about 20 minutes before Palin turned over the stage to Beck. He spoke — with chalkboards — for more than an hour. Sitting in the row behind me was a truck driver named Jerry Cole, who was from Fairbanks and wore an “I (heart) Woodrow Wilson” T-shirt with a slash through the heart. “He was the start of the Progressive Era,” Cole said of the long-dead president. “He believed that college intellectuals should decide how the world should be run.”
Beck’s Anchorage show started late — around 9 p.m. — and Beck was still speaking as 11 o’clock approached. He kept going, and going, and delivered a stem-winding ending about how George Washington became terrified at the end of his life about doing something that would dishonor himself and his country. I looked around the crowd of about 4,000, and it seemed no one had left. The room was perfectly silent after two hours plus — late on a Saturday night — to hear a self-described “recovering dirtbag” with not a single college credit to his name teach them history.
Sitting in his Mercury Radio Arts office three days later, Beck told me that he, too, noticed the silence and was astounded. “If someone had told me, ‘Hey, why don’t you tell some history stories at the end, and there will be dead silence,’ I’d have said, ‘No way.’ ” Beck has great distrust of success, especially his own. Friends say he is terrified of something going wrong, someone in his audience “doing something stupid” (presumably code for violence). There is a certain boyish disbelief in Beck as he engages in his real-time assessment, often on the air. “I told my wife, ‘I can’t believe I actually have reporters following me to Alaska,’ ” he said. (Note: reporter’s wife said the same thing.)
Beck told me that he recently threw away all of his old tapes from his Morning Zoo years, so his kids could not hear them. He has no idea what his role is in the political firmament. The notion seems to bore him. His most animated attacks on Obama in the days after the “Restoring Honor” rally were over his take on the president’s religious convictions, which Beck called “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
He is fragile, on the edge. There is no template for him or for where he is headed. “I have not prepared my whole life to be here,” Beck told me from his plush couch, his face turning bright pink. “I prepared my whole life to be in a back alley.” I expected him to cry, but he did not. Ω
[Mark Leibovich is a national political reporter for The New York Times in the Washington bureau. One of the newspaper's chief correspondents covering the 2008 presidential campaign, he specializes in political profiles, features, and essays. He is also a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Leibovich came to the Times in 2006 from The Washington Post, where he had covered national politics for the “Style” section and the U.S. technology sector for the “Business” section. Previously, he worked at The San Jose Mercury News and The (Boston) Phoenix.]
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times Company
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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Copyright © 2010 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
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