Eric Boehlert at Media Matters reported yesterday Glenn Beck’s Foxshow just posted another ratings low for this year. The new mark was set last Thursday when the show attracted 1.82 million viewers.
In late January and into February, the program was averaging 3 million viewers each week. Today, the viewership is trending around 2 million — which means that in a span of just three months, Glenn Beck has lost nearly one-third of its television audience.
How soft are Beck’s current ratings? He’s now posting the type of numbers that his show used to get when he was on vacation and somebody less famous stood in for him, like when he took a few days off in late March and his show averaged 1.9 million viewers.
Beck’s been back from his March vacation for weeks now, but his ratings are roughly the same as when he wasn’t even there.
Last August I wrote a post called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Health Insurance Reform“. When the post hit my Facebook page it ignited quite a discussion…one that ultimately led me to de-friending an old friend on Facebook, and in real life as well.
During this process, the friend in question offered to give me $50 to pay for Health Insurance. While I don’t believe he intended the offer in malice, to me it showed a genuine lack of respect for me as an individual, and a fundamental chasm between the way he and like-minded others looked at their fellow humans.
It wasn’t until I saw this video of a recent Tea Party protest where one angry protester throws dollars at a man with Parkinson’s that I realized the reason why I reacted so negatively to his offer. My friend, regardless of intent, made me feel like the guy with Parkinson’s, sitting silently on the ground while insults and dollars are thrown at him, essentially telling him, “We’re healthy and rich, you’re sick and poor, now go fuck off!” If you haven’t seen the video, here it is:
We live in a world of our own making. How we treat our neighbors, family, friends…even when we disagree is the greatest measure of our humanity.
Before the de-friending occurred, somewhere amidst a $50 Paypal transfer and my outright shock of the depth of his self-entitled rant, he forwarded me a Glenn Beck video and asked me to watch it. Having never actually watched Glenn Beck’s show, I acquiesced. This turned out to be a bad descision.
Thinking that somehow Glenn Beck would convince me that Health Care Reform in this country would lead to Nazism in America was possibly THE WORST argument he could have presented. Here’s the ACTUAL VIDEO he sent me asking me my “honest opinion.”
I honestly didn’t know what to say. Trying to follow Glenn Beck’s line of reasoning or finding accuracy in his logic is like trying build a house of cards with a retarded kid who just keeps screaming “UNO! UNO! UNO!”
So yesterday, after my epiphany about the Tea Party Parkinson’s video, when I saw this brilliant rant about Glenn Beck by Jon Stewart, it all tied together for me:
This is how I lost a friend in the Health Care Reform debate: Compassion.
You see, you can’t quantify compassion. You can’t solve compassion with an equation or by throwing dollars at people any more than you can draw conclusions by drawing circles on a blackboard. When someone is sick, you shouldn’t have to ask if they can afford to live.
It shouldn’t even be a factor.
It’s not my job or my mission to convince my ex-friend otherwise. It just made me sad that he doesn’t see just how wrong he is. Or how he made me feel. Or how he chooses to treat his fellow man. He lacks the fundamental human capacity for compassion. And I choose to not to live in his compassionless world.
If we live in a world of our own design…of our own making…I want mine to be a compassionate world. A happy world. A world where someone with Parkinson’s or Asthma or Cancer doesn’t have to be mocked or condescended to because they are sick, or worry about whether or not their insurance provider will cover this particular trip to the emergency room. That’s MY American dream.
Unfortunately there are some friendships that have been sacrificed along the way. I’ll gladly trade those for logic and reason and compassion any day.
Now I’m going to go outside and enjoy the rest of this beautiful spring day. You should too!
I never thought I’d have the Evangelical Christians helping fight against Glenn Beck, but it appears so.
“Glenn Beck has gone too far!” says the website of the New Evangelical Partnership. Based on my research of the group, they’re a new partnership, predominately evangelical in nature. The website has the words “Nuclear Disarmament”, “prison reform”, “Muslim-Christian Dialogue” and “creation care initiatives” emblazoned at the top.
I’m not sure what creation care initiatives are, but I do know what’s got them all riled up…something Beck said about “social justice”…
“I beg you, look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, the idea, hang on, am I advising people to leave their church… yes!… If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish.”
I haven’t looked through their whole website, but I gather from their reaction that you might find these words a few times.
Their plan to take down Glenn Beck? Of course….raise $5000 to produce a YouTube video.
– “We in no way want to promote the hateful rhetoric of Mr. Glenn Beck, and therefore take this matter very seriously,” said Dino Balzano, director of advertising at Concord Music Group, parent company of Hear Music, in an email to ColorOfChange.org.
– “We do not intend to have any additional ad placements during the program,” said Jeff Flaherty, spokesperson for Marriott International, in an email to ColorOfChange.org. “I’d like to point out that diversity and inclusion are core values at Marriott and an essential component of our success.”
– “I first learned about this controversy [in November] and asked Fox to take his show out of our rotation,” said Steve Schwartz, executive vice president of consumer services for Intersections, Inc., in an email to ColorOfChange.org. “We no longer advertise on Glenn Beck’s show.”
During a book signing in the private, gated community near Orlando called “The Villages”, Glenn Beck announced plans to do a tour to divide the country into 7 parts and conduct re-education camps.
Beck plans to teach ethics, history, finance and political science.
I’m not kidding. He says the first city on that tour will be Orlando on March 27, 2010 at UCF.
“It’s like looking into a mirror, after you’ve done a ton of coke off of it. Clearly, Glenn Beck is as sincere in what he says and does as I am in believing that baby carrots are trying to turn me gay.“ — Stephen Colbert
“Because if they can take Glenn Beck’s burst appendix to save his life, who’s to say that they can’t take out your healthy appendix tomorrow and eat it in front of you and your children?“ – Jon Stewart
Just when you thought he couldn’t display more stupidity…
Hypocrisy running rampant…
(I just didn’t have enough ways to start this one)
Glenn Beck, the brilliant tea bag / Obama hater / Morman conspiracy theorist, has come out strongly in opposition to Net Neutrality, blasting it as a “Marxist” plot by the Obama administration to take over the Internet.
For the last several nights, Beck has been warning his viewers about net neutrality, the idea that broadband providers should not favor their own content over competing programming.
“So we have Marxists that are designing and working on net neutrality — are believers in net neutrality” to “control content,” the outspoken Beck said Tuesday night.
Beck is actually arguing against his own interests. HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT NET NEUTRALITY IS.
Mr. Beck fails to understand the fundamentals of how the Internet works. By all reasonable metrics and his own interests, Beck should be in favor of Net Neutrality, because it guarantees streaming of his program will not be able to be placed behind, say, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown.
Without Net Neutrality, that could happen if NBC’s owner decided to pay protection money for prioritized data transmission.
Thursday, April 29
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