Glenn Beck Gets Out-Foxed

The Glenn Beck show at 5pm on Fox News has been cancelled. Did Fox finally wise up that Glenn Beck is a perpetual anger machine? Or was it just sagging ratings and poor advertising sales?

The Fox News press release had this to say:

"Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year."

Translation: Cancelled. It doesn't do much good to be #3 when you have alienated mainstream advertisers, hundreds of whom have been bypassing the Glenn Beck show.

Here's how Glenn Beck handled it on his show last night:

"I knew that if I made my case that something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have. I'm surprised at the number that have and haven't even with all of the facts."

Translation: The number of people who started out watching Glenn Beck but then stopped would be the #2 rated show on cable news.

Fox News and Glenn Beck are putting on the stony face and sticking to their story that Beck is moving on to bigger and better things. And it's not just Beck who is leaving Fox:

Joel Cheatwood, SVP/Development at FOX News, will be joining Mercury Radio Arts effective April 24, 2011. Part of his role as EVP will be to manage the partnership and serve as a liaison with FOX News.

Translation: Fox is letting Glenn Beck keep his babbysitter.

Fox News Chief Roger Ailes offered this spin:

"Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled. The other half say he quit. We're pretty happy with both of them."

Translation: Good riddance.

Neocons like Glenn Beck are essentially right-wing Marxists, and that means that like all Marxists they have no sense of humor, living and insisting that others live in a joyless world where every little thing is deadly serious.

Worse, Glenn Beck is a neocon populist, an oxymoron if there ever was one. Too often he came off as a moron on oxycontin. Before Keith Olbermann was forced out by MSNBC in January, that may have seemed fair and balanced to Fox, now it its just off kilter.

That does make you wonder, could Glenn and Keith make their come back together, with a Beck & Olbermann format modelled on the old Hannity & Colmes show? That could be called Two Angry Men.

Here on the east coast, the Glenn Beck show airs at 5pm and is repeated at 2am. Who can watch at those times? Unemployed people. And during the long jobless recovery of 2009 and 2010, their unemployment benefits kept getting extended and extended. With no more unemployment extensions for the 99ers, Glenn Beck's audience may have finally had to go find new jobs. Now it's his turn.

And when does Glenn Beck actually go off the air? If you stopped watching a couple of years ago, it really doesn't matter.



Update: American Glob nominates John Stossel to replace Beck. I wonder if Sarah Palin could also be in the wings, she hasn't had a show on Fox News yet.