Tag: Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is both Huge and Tiny

Glenn Beck has taken his television show to the internetz and is showing early success and a shitload of expansion. Deadline New York warns with this headline saying “Analyst: Media Execs ‘Should Be Very Afraid’ of Glenn Beck’s Web TV Launch.”
Should they really? First, a pictorial:
In the media images for GBTV on Becks news site TheBlaze, they show his set is a mix of his 2 Fox News sets (he switched studios during the time his show was on the air there) combining the newsroom theme with the living room “fire side chat” theme.

The only thing is that that monitor is only obviously a monitor at first glance in the picture above. The rest of the images messed with my mind as they showed a giant Beck, Godzilla-stomping among regular sized people while in another he appears to be tiny, sitting on a table in front of normal humans in the background, since it’s not immediately clear that one is an image on a large screen.

I found the pictures to be metaphorical since it is true that in a celebrity and public influence and following sense, Beck is both huge and tiny.

Consider a comparison to Oprah, who also left her popular daily television broadcast to start her own network (titled OWN, as it were): On the one hand, Beck is no where near the celebrity that Oprah is – however… This Wall Street Journal article says that GBTV already has more paid subscribers than OWN has total viewers… whoah..

Because Mr. Beck owns the show and the network, he could make substantially more than the $2.5 million salary he got each year at Fox. GBTV is on track to take in more than $20 million in revenue in its debut year, according to a person close to the company.

The television industry will be watching closely to see whether the TV host can preserve his popularity while migrating to the Web, where efforts to get consumers to pay to watch online-only channels are just beginning.

When Mr. Beck announced GBTV in June, the network had 80,000 subscribers. In the months since, GBTV subscribers have swelled to more than 230,000, according to people close to the network, even though Mr. Beck‘s show hasn’t yet begun.

The audience is far less than the more than 2.2 million daily viewers his program on Fox drew, on average, over its 27-month run, which ended in June after clashes with the network’s management.

But it is more than the average 156,000 people who were watching the Oprah Winfrey Network in June.

The thing to consider however, as any Youtube personality like myself can confirm, is that the number of subscribers does not equal the number of viewers. How to compute the difference between the two, I don’t know, but if they’re paying it is kindov secondary to ask “are they actually watching?”. And boy are they paying…

Analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG Research estimates that GBTV is already generating revenues of $27 million a year from subscription fees by monetizing a mere 1 percent of the total audience for his Fox show, his radio show, his websites (glennbeck.com and theblaze.com) and other outlets.

Mediate sums it up this way:

While Beck’s online venture is still relatively new, it’ll continue to be interesting to observe the different trajectories GBTV and OWN take as they forge their way. Here are two networks, albeit on different platforms, begun by two individuals who are themselves highly recognizable mega-brands. One is gradually building an audience as another is still hoping to find its place on television, and both depend highly on the trust viewers place on their respective founding personalities. Could you imagine what an episode devoted to Beck’s “favorite things” might pan out? Sales of chalk could go through the roof.

Glenn Beck… the tiniest giant in media?…

Glenn Beck news site writer is confused about political orientation

Glenn Beck is best known for his chalkboard writing Professor imitating monologues/speeches/sermons/whatever you want to call them, explaining political ideology and their representation in history and current events. Evidently though, he needs to send one of his writers for his news website The Blaze, Jonathon M. Seidl a few of his courses.

In a post titled Is the Oslo Gunman Really Right-Wing?, Seidl contests the claim by pointing to a Daily Mail article which opens its profile on Anders Behring Breivik with some information that allegedly “would seem to shake up any simple explanation of who he is or what he believed”:

The man responsible for the massacre in Norway was a member of a Swedish nazi forum which encourages attacks on government buildings.

It was also revealed by local police that he had extreme right wing views who hated Muslims.

According to Swedish website Expo Anders Behring Breivik is a member of ‘Nordisk’ which has 22,000 members and focuses on political terrorism.

[…]

[His Facebook profile] also listed interests such as body-building and freemasonry.[Emphasis added]

Okay? Despite lefties liking to call people on the right Nazi’s or claim that Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) movement movement was a right wing movement, the truth is that elements of both were involved

Next in the list the Blaze posted from the Daily Mail is uncited “right wing views” and Muslim hatred, where again – bigotry is not a qualifier anywhere on the political spectrum. After that is membership of a group that “focuses on political terrorism”. Again, not an ideology factor. True, it is more common on the left (presidential assassination, animal liberation, eco terrorism) than the right (the only conservative terrorism I can think of are the 8 or 9 people who have attempted or succeeded in abortion shootings or bombings) but “what is more frequent within” is not the same as what “is” or what defines an ideology.

And lastly, The Blaze puts in bold his activity in freemasonry, which is a culty conspiracy kindov thing often associated with Nazi’s. In fact, Hitler included in his declaration of war against America that FDR was allegedly a Freemason.

So far, that doesn’t add up to anything. Nazi + anti-Muslim + Nordisk + freemasonry adds up to kook. not right or left wing kook. So to decipher whether he is right or left in his belief system (which I acknowledge is a completely academic pursuit anyway, having no actual value), you have to go outside of these examples.

The Blaze however, does not. The Blaze says immediately after the list above (emphasis mine):

That’s certainly a mixed bag. And some of that information would seem to hint at a possible extreme leftist position, perhaps anarchism, would it not? It certainly doesn’t reflect the views of a conservative Christian, as he claimed to be.

The last part is right – he clearly wasn’t a “conservative Christian” even if he thought he was, but that isn’t what is being alleged. The allegation is that he was a far right wing extremist and anarchy is a far right extreme, not left. The far left extreme is Communism.

The error caught my interest only because Beck himself is so passionate about these differences. For someone who takes such care and effort to broadcast the differences between right and left, having the opposite of those definitions on your truth-news website is kindov a big deal.

For future reference, I’ll text-map the left/right divide for you (start in the middle and go left for more state control over the individual and right for more personal freedom):

Communism <– Socialism <– Liberalism <– POPULIST –> Conservatism –> Libertarianism –> Anarchism

 

Is it right to celebrate Bin Ladens Death?

More on this later. First I have to somehow process that this actually happened:

Via Popwatch:

“This is a great day in the war on terror. But as I watched all the celebrations taking place on the streets of America, all over America, you may have — and maybe I’m alone — had a strange feeling,” Beck said. “You may have seen students jumping into the lake in Ohio and rushing to the White House bearing signs and smoking cigars. As I watched these things happen last night, I couldn’t help but be reminded of when the Palestinians danced in the streets and passed out candy after the 9/11 attacks, when they danced in the streets over the killing of five American students and the slaughter of a Jewish family. All of these things, you know and I know, were offensive. All of those victims were innocent. America, we are better than this. We are better than jumping into lakes and holding signs and cigars. I think we’re better than that. I mean, why hand out candy… when you can have cookies, and confetti, and a marching band, huh?” Cue the entrance of the Soul Tigers marching band drum line and Beck dancing around the studio while holding a plate of cookies and confetti dropped.

When the song ended, he spoke again. “That was tasteless and offensive…. My apologies for the marching [band]. No, I’m not gonna apologize for that,” he said. “I actually felt really kind of bad today about some of the grotesque displays, and then I thought, you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Later in the hour, Beck referenced his opening again. “Every time I think that, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we could do the cookies or the confetti or whatever,’ I see that it’s not marching in the streets for innocent victims. It is celebrating in the streets for a journey that has been and hard and been fought valiantly with honor. And people have tried to do the right thing. And this guy was certainly not innocent….”

Beck bags on Brown

This is so weird that I don’t even have a guess on how to explain it. Is Beck a closet liberal? Is he lying with this commentary because he knows that if he comes out against him then it will actually help Brown? Has he been lying about his ideology all this time and couldn’t hold back any more in this instance? None of these make any sense.

wtf? this is just creepy. It reeks of projection in a big bad way. I thought I was being cute by saying yesterday that he “pimped out his daughters” but Beck is being serious, which makes it retarded. Um, the dude wasn’t like “check out how fucking hot my daughters are! lol u guyz. who wants to tap this?? seriously. you can do it. i’ll let you. lol. can I watch tho?? lol, nah, jk. maybe! lol!!1”. Mark Levin, a conservative radio host who has criticize Beck before, kinda nails it here:

You know, the really ignorant thing about criticizing Brown is that in kidding around with his girls, it actually shows he is a good family man. Ask any guy who is a father of girls: doing something deliberately to provoke the “oh daddy!” squirm of embarrassment from the teenage daughters is something only a father with a good, comfortable relationship does (and he never misses a chance to do so).

If smearing Brown was a joke, I don’t think it was very funny. It’s very weird.

UPDATE: it gets even weirder… Beck responded to this with 4 minutes of saying “it was just a joke, you need to learn to take a joke, joke joke JOKE JOKE JUST A JOKE…. joke”. wtf? This is… not honest. Beck was making jokes… in service to the smearing of this Brown guy. No one was crying about making fun of a politician, as Glenn is responding to (he’s on some show where the host is named Jay, not that you’d know that from the uploaders logo being the only thing visible on this clip). The reason Becks rants about Brown being creepy and a person of poor judgment who can’t be trusted were weird and smears were not because Beck used colorful language like “this could end with a dead intern”, it was because Beck was serious about the criticisms behind the jokes and that is weird.

Even more on the “just a joke” brigade from Glenns own show (which reveals that this happened before the above clip and the show he was on was a local Boston radio show):

Glenn Beck punk’s hippie bloggers with Froggate stunt

Glenn Beck, in a segment explaining why, despite his being a staunch critic of Barack Obama’s, he thinks John McCain would have been worse for the country if he had won the 2008 election, used a decidedly controversial visual aid: He tossed a frog into a boiling pot of water on his set.

The stunt was not only an effective attention grabber (had me on the edge of my seat when I watched it at home) but a clever illustration to the warning not to believe everything you hear. Beck was debunking the anecdote that “if you put a frog in boiling water, it will notice the danger and jump out, but if you put it in room temperature water and slowly boil it, it won’t notice and will die”. So Beck goes to a little childrens case of tiny pet frogs and throws one in, expecting it to jump right out and it doesn’t – to which Beck reacts by telling you to “forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. forget about the Democrats, because most of THEM are fake. and forget about the frog, because IT was fake”. Then after a commercial break, he fished the plastic frog out of the pot and verified that no animals were harmed during the segment.

Okay. weird. interesting. kinda cute. right?
F*ck no. There was shock and outrage – OUTRAGE I SAY!! – over Beck murdering one of these tiny little spitwads. And these are not vegan sources, thus making their outrage more than a lot hypocritical since, uh – what exactly makes killing an amphibian to illustrate a political point servicing millions of viewers worse than killing a mammal to eat or wear in service to 1? dumbdumbs…

Most of these blogs were relying on an edited youtube video of the segment that cut out Beck stating that the frog was fake. tsk tsk bloggers… Beck gladly accepted the win on his show today:

Charles Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs.com was unhappy about getting the attention over his dubious headline titled “Glenn Beck: Frog Killer” and responded to Beck showing this oops-post of his on air with an impossibly worse/more embarrassing claim: “Beck Lies about LGF“… oy… the “lie” being that Beck didn’t include that Johnson had mentioned in the LGF post that falsely call Beck a “Frog Killer” that there was a possibility that it was a trick. Charles seems to be going through a tough time in his online life as his former admirers start piling on him as he goes through a recent change of calling former colleagues and like-minds racists, liars, kooks, and more and I feel kinda bad for him but… dude… it’s not a “lie” to show that you made a false claim based on edited video you didn’t bother investigating. Ya, it would have been nice for Beck to bail Johnson out a tad and include that Johnson, after stating the false claim as fact, also showed his openness to the possibility that it was a gag, but Johnson has no reason to expect such a pass.

Wtf is wrong with this world when its right-wing leaning bloggers that erroneously freak out over animal cruelty that didn’t take place and PETA is the sane voice of calmness and reason?… yikes.

Race-baiting Glenn Beck Boycott is an Epic Fail

A few weeks ago, a group no one has ever heard of, called Color of Change, started a boycott against Fox News opinion show host Glenn Beck because Beck stated an opinion they found unacceptable: Beck said he thinks Barack Obama is essentially racist (oh no he di-int!).

Color of Change, under the headline Stop the race baiting,  immediately organized Beck-haters to call or contact advertisers  to notify they will be boycotting their product as long as they continue to run their ads on Beck’s show.

stoptheracebaiting.hypocrisy

Problem: Van Jones, the leader of Color of Change is the Dictator of Race Batia. He has first place trophies on his shelves for the annual Race Bating County Fair. If he were on the supreme court he would be Race Bater Ginsburg.

The picture to the right from the Hannity show makes it look like Van Jones is wearing a Hannity pin on his jacket. so. like. i thought that was funny.

First: Jones called President Bush a racist…

Stop the race baiting? In a Sept. 1, 2005 Huffington Post op-ed, “Bush’s Role in the Drowning of New Orleans,” Jones wrote:

Don’t say that a hurricane destroyed New Orleans. Hurricanes don’t drown cities.It was a “perfect storm” of a different kind that put that great city underwater: Bush-era neglect of our national infrastructure, combined with runaway global warming and a deep contempt for poor African-Americans. [emphasis added]

Hmmm. Should someone be getting outraged over a person accusing the President of being a racist, if..um.. they called the President a fkking racist?

Van “Stop the Race Baiting” Jones also thinks white people are poisoning black communities. Hmm. that’s a pretty inflammatorily race baiting accusation. Plenty evidence to call this hypocrite boycott against Beck a fraud and and a scam, but as the late Billy Mays would say: But wait! there’s more!

Goodness… So the guy Beck has been calling out then orders a boycott against Beck for saying one thing that was less offensive than any of the things he himself has said. and he works in the Obama administration. Awesome.

Oh ya, and he thinks President Bush was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Maybe he changed his mind though? Cuz last night he issued a statement apologizing and said the petition he signed suggesting that President Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen” perhaps to justify war in Afghanistan or Iraq, “does not reflect my views now or ever.” Except, it seems that “or ever” should have had an asterisk after it to clarify that in *this* case “ever” means “except in 2002 when he endorsed the same claim”.

An administration source told Jake Tapper of ABC News that Van “Stop the Race Baiting” Jones did not carefully review the language in the 9/11 conspiracy petition before agreeing to add his name in 2004 – but oops – this morning information surfaced that shows Jones was on the organizing committee of a 2002 march making the same 9/11 conspiracy claims.

clinton-van-jones1
Van Jones pictured with the 3 most powerful men in the world

It’s all no big deal though, right? It’s not like he’s a Republican or anything (then it would be REALLY serious).

Okay, so Van Jones is a raging hypocrite and a master-race-bater who is almost as intolerant of white people as he is of criticism. Big deal. What liberal isn’t, right? (yuk yuk). Charles Krauthammer nails it in the video below where he rightly notes that calling Republicans assholes and the fact that he had admitted to being an actual Communist [and black nationalist] may be lame and all but pretty small potatoes, but goes on to say that being a 9/11 conspiracy wingnut IS in fact a big ass fkking deal showing signs of psychotic paranoia and must disqualify you from working in the federal fricken government.

As for that “stop the race baiting” boycott? Fail.
A few advertisers simply diverted their commercials on Fox News to other programs on the channel rather than Beck’s. Some boycott. Color of Change allegedly lied about advertisers dropping out, and Beck’s ratings have never been higher. His show airs at 5 freakin PM eastern (2pm Pacific) and is getting at least 2.5 million and often going over 3 million viewers. To put in context how massive 3 million viewers is on a daytime cable news channel, consider this perspective: The CBS Evening News averages about 4 million viewers a night. The Daily Show and Colbert Report each get around 1.5 million viewers a night, in primetime.

Far from Beck even inching in the direction of losing his job, to make things even more hilariously embarrassing: many are predicting that Jones will be the victim of “backfire scheme of the year” and have to resign before Monday.

EPIC FAIL.

*UPDATE: Midnight Sunday morning, as predicted, Van Jones resigned…


Glenn Beck: the country will be saved by alcoholics & drug addicts

Glenn Beck reads Dr. Keith Ablow a list of names people have called him “just this week,” including “idiotic,” “delusional” and “full of crap” and then says that addicts will save the country…

Toward the end, Beck says, “If you are a racist… you know who you are.” lulz.

Glenn Beck thinks Obama is racist

Beck is wrong, but it is more wrong for the shallow minded hippies who oppose him to brush him off as just a nut and an asshole so they don’t have to burn the calories actually defending the President they support.

Protesters constantly and illegally called for the murder of president Bush while he was in office, and hardly any such cases were prosecuted and a total of zero of them were the discussions of cable news shows and mainstream media reports of concern. Bush as Hitler was a popular meme among the hippie detractors and a small faction within those same hippie detractors are now trying to get that label stuck on Obama (though will no success as most of their fellow liberals like the guy). How come this wasn’t an OMFG moment back then, but now one dude says he thinks a President who attended a Black Nationalist church for 20 years might have a problem with race and this is the time to freak the fuck out?…really?

Glenn Explains His Statement made on Fox & Friends. Not by any consensus definition (Political Correctness Demanding There Be No Such Thing As A Black Racist) but by the standards that the Media has employed against whites there is no question Obama isa racist.

Still not satisfied? Beck continues explaining in a continuation of the clip above:

Parody War: Beck vs Colbert

Two weeks ago, Glenn Beck turned a Friday edition of his show into an hour long special titled the “War Room“, covering possible disaster situations and how we would/would have to/should deal with them. The full show is here below, and a decent watch, but if you’re only interested for purposes of the Colbert relation then hit play and then you can move along after the first minute.

Naturally, Stephen Colbert thought it was over the top and parodied it with his bigger, scarier alarmist special: the “Doom Bunker“. (go here if the video below becomes unavailable)

SO… in what is a unique occurrence – a parody reply to a parody reply – Beck parodied Colbert parodying HIM with Beck’s new faux segment with the shows “Fear Consultant” coming to him live from the “Doom Room” (a padded room within the Doom Bunker). I loled…

Black Holes are “crushingly dense sucking things, like giant Paris Hiltons”?…. Dude… Colbert’s been zinged with funnier writing…by FOX NEWS…..