September 12th, 2012
I’ve been sort of fascinated by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze for the last few months. So far as I can tell, it’s a dominant internet property doing both enormous traffic and real business. It’s a slick magazine. And it’s a real, live internet TV channel, with an actual line-up of daily programming and on-air talent and ambition to spare.
Yet what really fascinates me is how The Blaze seems to be basically ignored by the rest of the media world. While everyone else is writing about what Buzzfeed and Huffington Post are doing (which are also both interesting) it’s like The Blaze is tearing up the world and making money hand over fist in some alternate universe which is invisible to media reporters in the mainstream.
If you want further evidence that The Blaze is probably the media story of the last year, check out this news that Beck has reached a deal with Dish Network to bring its TV component to the satcaster.
It’s pretty amazing. Anyone can have a cable channel–there’s probably 100 channels that exist with virtually no viewership. But Beck looks like he’s trying to build a channel by establishing his audience on the internet first, and then porting them over to satellite (and eventually cable) after the fact. It’s ingenious and daring and really impressive.
What’s bizarre is why no one is writing about it.
(This essay on The Atlantic, on the other hand, I have been waiting for for years. And it satisfies nearly every desire. Via The Transom.)
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Men are from Mars, women are from The Atlantic.
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It’s mostly over the lack of brand awareness outside of Glenn Beck’s fans – Huffington Post/Buzzfeed/Breitbart/Fox News/whatever get talked about often by people who don’t agree with it.
I also did Google searches for The Blaze – a many first-page links are for FM radio stations with that moniker. “Blaze Glenn Beck” gives me pages of direct links to it – there’s occasional links from other news sites, but not as many as you might think.
Reminds me of Howard Stern’s media presence – he’s both undeniably popular yet his hold on popular culture is muted compared to his terrestrial radio days. If you’re not a Howard fan, you’re just not noticing him.
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I’m going to have to wait until it gets to Netflix.
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Speaking of The Atlantic, one thing that I like very much about it is that the back of the magazine is dominated by a San Fernando Valley Mafia linked to Benjamin Schwarz: Sarah Tsing Loh, Caitlin Flanagan, and so forth. They seem more in touch with certain long term trends in America less visible to the DC/NYC national media. For example:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/06/benjamin-schwarzs-laments-end-of.html
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That really says it all–it figures The Atlantic’s heartland correspondents would include a famous-for-Santa-Monica multimedia celebrity, a Bay Area-born neoconservative, and a literary Manhattanite with a special interest in Golden Age Hollywood
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Due to demographic change, the U.S. is becoming more like the San Fernando Valley writ large, just with worse weather.
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My impression is that Glenn Beck was thrown out of the mainstream media, despite being wildly profitable, because he reminded important people of past populist anti-Semites such as Father Coughlin. Granted, he’s highly pro-Israel, but is seen as a _potential_ anti-Semite, thus justifying a pre-emptive strike on his career.
For example, speaking of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in 2011:
“This is a post about Beck’s recent naming of nine people—eight of them Jews—as enemies of America and humanity. … That said, Beck has not crossed a certain line, by identifying his targets openly as Jewish. … Nevertheless, this, to me, is a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. … My modest suggestion to those Jews who fear the building of mosques in American cities is that they look elsewhere for threats that seem to be gathering against them.”
I looked into the details of Goldberg’s J’Accuse, and they turned out to be preposterous:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/glenn-beck-jeffrey-goldberg-and-the-dog-whistle-that-wasnt
But, in 21st Century America, there are few if any penalties for falsely accusing somebody of anti-Semitism.
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After Beck was fired by Fox, Dana Milbank wrote a Washington Post column gloating “Why Beck Lost It:”
“And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.”
But, the examples Milbank cited would only strike the most paranoid as anti-Semitic.
The real problem with Beck was not that he is anti-Semitic (he’s highly pro-Semitic), but he is an autodidact. He reads books, and then he gets up and rambles about what he’s learned as he tries to connect together his new knowledge.
The problem with Beck was that he was a _potential_ loose cannon.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/04/preemptive-anti-anti-semitism.html
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I wouldn’t have thought Steve Sailer would be a fan of Glenn Beck. Beck blends arch-neoconism(especially in foreign policy), with John Birch Society-type ideology, and drizzles vague religious right sentiments on top.
He’s not a paleocon, and he flips out anytime anyone talks about evolution, or Darwinism. Part of his critique of the left is to connect them to the old Progressive movement, many of whom were eugenics-friendly at the time. Eugenics = The Nazis ….therefore the left are the real Nazis! or something like that.
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Putting aside the haute-bourgeois anxiety provoked by Beck’s autodidacticism and protean political philosophies the business story is less novel in the media cornucopia era. I remember the “60 Minutes” segment on Tyler Perry, assigned to black interviewer Byron Pitts who blatantly lacked any firsthand familiarity with the work. It would be the same kind of anthropology expedition if they produced one for about Alex Jones, Juggalos, or MMA (maybe those 3 could be combined into a single show), not to mention spin-off wrestling leagues
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Amy September 12, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Nobody is writing about Beck because he’s so hated among the media elites. They cannot stand what he says, what he believes in or his enormous success. Beck has been a leader in the Conservative resurgence over the past few years and has predicted world and national events with uncanny accuracy. He is indeed a very special man and if he was a liberal, he might be as important as Barack. But alas, he is an EVIL, AWFUL, HORRIBLE, WOMAN HATING, MISOGYNISTIC. JEW LOVING, GOD FEARING MORMON WHO STIRS UP TROUBLE! Certainly they don’t want to call any attention to his new satellite channel because people might watch it. I for one am so glad to have him back on the tube as I haven’t been able to stream his internet feeds very well. Bravo Mr. Beck…I applaud you!