In the spirit of full disclosure, I feel it’s important that I make this fact public: This isn’t my only blog, and it was started because I wanted a more professional voice online. Something I’d feel comfortable with a current or future employer or colleague reading. So politics is one of the issues I decided to avoid here. I’m going to attempt to write about the upcoming departure of Glenn Beck from Fox News without injecting my own political views, a tightrope to walk indeed.
There’s a very vocal group, the liberal Media Matters organization, which would like to claim Beck’s announcement this week as their victor. It is my personal belief that this is absolutely not the case. Beck’s numbers were in a well reported decline over the last year, and Media Matters may have played a small role in that fact, and they most likely played a larger role in the reported loss of an estimated 400 advertisers pulling their support from the show. So, in those ways, Media Matters had some influence.
I think the tipping point is more likely to have been two things: the growing resentment of politics across the country and the Tucson shooting from this past January. In January of 2010, Beck’s viewers were reported to be upwards of 2.9 million, easily the best in his 5pm est. time slot. A year later, he had lost an estimated million viewers. It wasn’t that his show only brought in conservative viewers, as often liberals watched out of either curiosity or just to keep an eye on someone they viewed as the enemy, doing their best to follow Don Corleone’s advice regarding your friends and enemies. I think a lot of those viewers were immediately turned off after Gabrielle Gifford’s was stuck by what many thought was the bullets of an extremist.
Keep in mind the fact that Fox News announced that along with Beck transitioning off the air by year’s end, that they had reached an agreement to produce some future shows with Beck’s production company, Mercury Radio Arts. Fox News Executive Vice President, Joel Cheatwood, would be joining Beck’s company as a liaison to Fox News. If Fox News had grown tired of Beck and the controversy that followed him, they would have completely separated themselves from Beck.
Make no mistake; Beck isn’t riding off into the sunset. He’s a multi-media juggernaut, and while he may be leaving his show and losing some markets for his radio show, his imprint is large and has a very loyal fan base, a base willing to spend precious disposable income on Beck. Beck has reached the New York Times Bestseller list four times, his tours have generated millions of dollars (his next scheduled stop in Kansas City next week, only has seats to the side available, and they start at $126) and we all saw how he drew an estimated crowd of 87,000.
Last August Beck launched TheBlaze.com, a conservative answer to left leaning Huffingtonpost.com (if you look at the two, you can see how the Blaze was even styled to look similar to HP) and Beck also has content available to paying subscribers only. Subscribers pay as much as $9.95 a month for access. GlennBeck.com also has an online store, where one can purchase items such as mugs (starting at $17.95) tee-shirts (starting at $25.00) as well as DVDs and books.
The Beck brand is healthy, and I suspect he’s going to do even more online. His radio show can already be watched on his website, by those subscribing monthly. I envision him doing something like a weekly Webshow, where he can be even more over the top. Beck is many things, but he’s also a very smart entertainer. He made his bones as a morning shock jock DJ, ala Howard Stern, and if you watch him, you can see he still uses many of the same tactics. He often shocks his audience, then teases them with something that will shock them even greater, seemingly always waiting for them after the commercial break. Many will say Fox News encouraged him, and to some extent I am sure that they did. But with advertisers to answer to, there will always be a line drawn. Now those advertisers are the companies Beck chooses to endorse, not who Fox News sells slots to. I think the Beck that will exist after he leaves Fox will be even more shocking, and he’ll have to be, to get more people to pay money to hear what he’s saying, and I don’t think many more will pay to hear what he’s already been saying for the past two plus years.
Glenn Beck isn’t going away, in fact, I think he may be blazing a path for the future of online commentators and opinion makers.
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