| Name | Glenn Beck |
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| Caption | Beck at the Time 100 Gala, 2010 |
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| Birth name | Glenn Edward Lee Beck Beck has described his mother's death as a suicide in interviews during television and radio broadcasts. |
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In 2002 Beck created Mercury Radio Arts, a media platform he named after Orson Welles's seminal Mercury Theatre on the Air, which produced live theatrical broadcasts during the 1930s. Beck's company's president and chief operating officer was Chris Balfe and , employed more than 40 people
Radio
In 1983 he moved to
Corpus Christi, Texas, to work at radio station
KZFM. In mid-1985, Beck was hired away from KZFM to be the lead DJ for the morning-drive radio broadcast by
WRKA in
Louisville, Kentucky. His four-hour weekday show was called
Captain Beck and the A-Team. The show slipped to third in the market and Beck left abruptly in 1987 amid a dispute with WRKA management.
Months later, Beck was hired by Phoenix Top-40 station KOY-FM, then known as Y-95. Beck was partnered with Arizona native Tim Hattrick to co-host a local "morning zoo" program. During his time at Y-95, Beck cultivated a rivalry with local pop radio station KZZP and that station's morning host Bruce Kelly. Through practical jokes and publicity stunts, Beck drew criticism from the staff at Y-95 when the rivalry culminated in Beck telephoning Kelly's wife on-the-air, mocking her recent miscarriage. In 1989, Beck resigned from Y-95 to accept a job in Houston at KRBE, known as Power 104. Beck was subsequently fired in 1990 due to poor ratings.
Beck then moved on to Baltimore, Maryland and the city's leading Top-40 station, WBSB, known as B104. There, he partnered with Pat Gray, a morning DJ. During his tenure at B104, Beck was arrested and jailed for speeding in his DeLorean. According to a former associate, Beck was "completely out of it" when a station manager went to bail him out. When Gray, then Beck were fired, the two men spent six months in Baltimore, planning their next move. In early 1992, Beck and Gray both moved to WKCI-FM (KC101), a Top-40 radio station in Hamden, Connecticut. When Gray left the show to move to Salt Lake City, Beck continued with co-host Vinnie Penn. At the end of 1998, Beck was informed that his contract would not be renewed at the end of 1999.
The Glenn Beck Program first aired in 2000 on WFLA (AM) in Tampa, Florida, and took their afternoon time slot from eighteenth to first place within a year. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported that Beck's use of "distorted or inflammatory rhetoric" has complicated the channel's and their journalist's efforts to neutralize White House criticism that Fox is not really a news organization. Television analyst Andrew Tyndall echoed these sentiments, saying that Beck's incendiary style had created "a real crossroads for Fox News", stating "they're right on the cusp of losing their image as a news organization."
Books
Since 2005, Beck has toured American cities twice a year, presenting a one-man stage show. His stage productions are a mix of stand-up comedy and inspirational speaking. In a critique of his live act,
Salon Magazine's Steve Almond describes Beck as a "wildly imaginative performer, a man who weds the operatic impulses of the demagogue to the grim mutterings of the conspiracy theorist."
In March 2003, Beck ran a series of rallies called Glenn Beck's Rally for America in support of troops deployed for the upcoming Iraq War. On July 4, 2007, Beck served as host of the 2007 Toyota Tundra "Stadium of Fire" in Provo, Utah. The annual event at LaVell Edwards Stadium on the Brigham Young University campus is presented by America's Freedom Foundation.
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"Tree of Revolution" chalk board, from the September 18, 2009, episode of his television show. The "roots" of the tree (from L to R) are made up Che Guevara, Woodrow Wilson, and Saul Alinsky, while the "trunk" is the Students for a Democratic Society and Cloward–Piven strategy. Comprising the "money leaves" of the tree (from L to R) are Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Wade Rathke, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Dale Rathke, President Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Valerie Jarrett, Apollo Alliance, Van Jones, Leo Gerard, Carl Pope, Ruben Aronin, and Jeff Jones. Beck believes that such progressivism infects both main political parties and threatens to "destroy America as it was originally conceived." In Beck’s book Common Sense, he argues that "progressivism has less to do with the parties and more to do with individuals who seek to redefine, reshape, and rebuild America into a country where individual liberties and personal property mean nothing if they conflict with the plans and goals of the State."
A collection of progressives whom Beck has referred to as "Crime Inc", comprise what Beck contends is a clandestine conspiracy to take over and transform America. According to Beck, these individuals already have or are surreptitiously working in unison with an array of organizations and corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, ACORN, Apollo Alliance, Tides Center, Chicago Climate Exchange, Generation Investment Management, Enterprise Community Partners, Petrobras, Center for American Progress, and the SEIU; to fulfill their progressive agenda. In his quest to root out these "progressives", Beck has compared himself to Israeli Nazi hunters, vowing on his radio show that "to the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter. 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."
Historian Sean Wilentz has denounced Beck's progressive-themed conspiracy theories and "gross historical inaccuracies", countering that Beck is merely echoing the decades-old "right-wing extremism" of the John Birch Society.
Ideological influences
Political and historical
An author with ideological influence on Beck is W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006), a prolific conservative political writer, American Constitutionalist and faith-based political theorist. Skousen believed that American political, social, and economic elites were working with Communists to foist a world government on the United States. Beck praised Skousen's "words of wisdom" as "divinely inspired", referencing Skousen's The Naked Communist which Beck said in 2007 had "changed his life". According to Skousen's nephew, Mark Skousen, Leap reflects Skousen's "passion for the United States Constitution", which he "felt was inspired by God and the reason behind America’s success as a nation." Beck authored a foreword for the 2008 edition of Leap and Beck's on-air recommendations in 2009 propelled the book to number one in the government category on Amazon for several months. In 2010, Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard criticized Beck's conspiratorial bent, terming him "a Skousenite." noting that in Beck's novel The Overton Window, which Beck describes as "faction" (fiction based on fact), one of his characters states "Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope, the only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace."
Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz postulates that alongside Skousen, Robert W. Welch, Jr., founder of the John Birch Society, is a key ideological foundation of Beck's worldview. Beck has also urged his listeners to read The Coming Insurrection, a book by a French Marxist group discussing what they see as the imminent collapse of capitalist culture.
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on August 28, 2010.]]
Spiritually, Beck has credited God for saving him from drug and alcohol abuse, professional obscurity and friendlessness. In 2006, Beck performed a short inspirational monologue in Salt Lake City, Utah, Philip Barlow, the Arrington chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, has said that Beck's belief that the U.S. Constitution was an "inspired document," his calls for limited government and for not exiling God from the public sphere, "have considerable sympathy in Mormonism." a commentator rather than a reporter, He has said that he identifies with Howard Beale, a character portrayed by Peter Finch in the film Network: "When he came out of the rain and he was like, none of this makes any sense. I am that guy." An earlier cover story in Time described Beck as "a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies", proclaiming that he has "emerged as a virtuoso on the strings" of conservative discontent by mining "the timeless theme of the corrupt Them thwarting a virtuous Us."
Beck's shows have been described as a "mix of moral lessons, outrage and an apocalyptic view of the future ... capturing the feelings of an alienated class of Americans."
Republican South Carolina U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham criticized Beck as a "cynic" whose show was antithetical to "American values" at The Atlantic's 2009 First Draft of History conference, remarking "Only in America can you make that much money crying."
Glenn Beck was honored by Liberty University during their 2010 Commencement exercises with an honorary Doctoral Degree. During his keynote address to the students, he stated "As a man who was never able to go to college — I’m the first in my family that went; I went for one semester; I couldn’t afford more than that — I am humbly honored." Writer Bob Cesca, in a review of Bunch's book, compares Beck to Steve Martin's faith-healer character in the 1992 film Leap of Faith, before describing the "derivative grab bag of other tried and tested personalities" that Bunch contends comprises Beck's persona:
In October 2010 a polemical biography by Dana Milbank was released: . The October 31 Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, hosted by Comedy Central personalities Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, was conceived as a parody of Beck's earlier Rally to Restore Honor. Jones characterized the attacks from his opponents as a "vicious smear campaign" and an effort to use "lies and distortions to distract and divide."
In 2009, lawyers for Beck brought a case (Beck v. Eiland-Hall) against the owner of a satirical website named GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The claim that the domain name of the website is itself defamatory was described as a first in cyberlaw. Included in its subscription service:
Fusion online magazine, launched in 2005
The 4th Hour with Stu & Pat, a weekday live video blog by Stu Burguiere and Pat Gray, begun in 2010
Beck University, interactive classes offered beginning in July 2010
In August 2010, Mercury Radio Arts also launched the independent political blog, The Blaze.
See also
Beck University
Conservative talk
List of most-listened-to radio programs
References
External links
Glenn Beck's Official Website
Glenn Beck's Radio Program
Glenn Beck – The 912 Project
Glenn Beck's Common Sense Tour
Official Site at Fox News
Multimedia
A Day in the Life of Glenn Beck - photo slideshow by Time magazine
Katie Couric Interview of Glenn Beck - video by CBS News
"Brand it like Beck" - video interview by Forbes magazine
John Stossel: "Glenn Beck, Conservative Narcissist?" - video by ABC News
Glenn Beck Discusses his Mormonism - video testimonial at The Week
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