Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form:

Believe in something!  Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

Glenn Beck has been telling a personal story illustrating what he says is a particularly intense level of hatred on the left.

According to the newly signed Fox News host, he was verbally assaulted by a truck driver while standing in line at a Wendy's restaurant at a truck stop. Writing on his blog, Beck says the truck driver called him a "racist bigot," blaming the talk show host and conservatives "for everything." Wrote Beck, "The hatred was palpable." As his security detail stood between him and his assailant, Beck says the truck driver ended his rant by threatening to run him over.

It was ugly stuff, and Beck was shocked by the level of hate: "I wanted to say, I think you have me mistaken for someone else, but I knew he knew who I was and he just hated me for who I was…. Wow. Is this who we've become? Is this who we've become?"

Concluding his appeal to civility, Beck explained that he wouldn't treat his enemies the way the truck driver treated him: "I could stand in line with Michael Moore and I wouldn't say that to him. I would say some things to Michael Moore, but it wouldn't be that. Is this who we've become? I believe there is a cauldron of hatred on both sides, but the left is quite frightening."

Beck might not say such things to Moore in person, but he has expressed a desire to murder Moore to his nationally syndicated radio audience (Glenn Beck Program, 5/18/05):

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out--is this wrong?

And Beck wasn't exactly the picture of civility two years earlier when he told his listeners that he prayed nightly for anti-war presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to be consumed by fire (Glenn Beck Program, 3/16/03): "Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames."

Beck repeated his Wendy's story on Fox's On the Record (11/17/08)--only in this version, Beck said Fox News was among the targets of the truck driver's vitriol. As he explained to host Greta Van Susteren, the story illustrated that "the left is just unbelievably out of control right now."

Whatever the truth is about Beck's truck driver story, his own record of hatred, including a prediction that in 10 years time "Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West," is not merely a matter of angry words spouted in a fast food shop, but a matter of nationally broadcast hatred.

With Glenn Beck's recent departure from CNN Headline News for Fox News Channel, there's an idea going around that his Headline News show was at least a ratings success. Beck "was arguably the network’s most conservative political voice and stirred up both controversy and better ratings in his time slot," wrote the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Kristi Swartz (10/21/08). Fox News, in announcing Beck's move, boasted that his show "has grown more than 200 percent in viewership in both the 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. timeslots since its 2006 debut."

The fact is, though, that aside from being a hatemonger who threatens entire religious groups with concentration camps if they fail to become vigilante killers (I'm not kidding--see FAIR Action Alert, 12/5/06), Beck is not a particularly popular TV personality. More than a year ago, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert (7/31/07) was asking "How Low (in the Ratings) Can Glenn Beck Go?"--and pointing out that his ratings were worse than Paula Zahn's, whom CNN let go for low ratings.

Beck's ratings have improved this year, it's true--but so have his competitors', due to the intense interest in the presidential race, leaving Beck consistently a distant fourth in the cable news ratings. To take a more or less random day, look at October 14, two days before the announcement that he was switching networks. (The day before the announcement was a debate day, so the numbers weren't typical.) According to TV Newser, a website that tabulates the Nielsen ratings, he got 575,000 viewers for his 7 p.m. slot--compared with 1.1 million for Lou Dobbs on CNN, 1.4 million for Chris Matthews on MSNBC and more than 2 million for Shepard Smith on Fox.  In the 25-54 demographic--which is what matters from a business perspective, since those are the viewers that advertisers want to pay for--Beck did slightly better, but still got beat roughly two-to-one by his rivals.

After Beck, Headline News would show Nancy Grace, the tabloid-style crime show.  On October 14--and this was not so unusual--Grace got about triple the audience that Beck got, in both total viewers and in "the demo"--and was actually competitive with the shows on at the same time on the other cable news networks. (She came in third, behind the O'Reilly Factor and Keith Olbermann's Countdown, but ahead of Campbell Brown on CNN.)

Then Headline News would re-air Beck's show--and would typically lose a lot of Grace's audience; on October 14, Headline News went from 1.5 million at 8 to 667,000 at 9. Meanwhile, the other news networks were maintaining or growing their audiences, leaving Beck with about one-quarter the total viewers of Hannity & Colmes, and roughly one-third the viewers of Larry King Live and Rachel Maddow.

Then, at 10, the rerun of Nancy Grace added 400,000 people to Headline News' audience.

That's just one night, but that seems to be the basic pattern: Beck did much worse in the ratings than the shows he was competing against, and much worse than the show both his primetime slots led into.  Perhaps CNN and Headline News will take the lesson that at the very bottom of the barrel, there isn't much worth eating.

(It's certainly possible that Beck will do better on Fox, where he may inherit an audience from his lead-in that is more in tune with his rantings.  That doesn't mean it was a good business decision for CNN to hire him--or to keep him on the schedule for almost three years.)

Over the past several weeks, 28 million copies of an anti-Muslim propaganda film, Obsession, have been delivered to the doorsteps of newspaper subscribers in swing states.

Unfortunately, as a new report by FAIR documents, the media's complicity in smearing an entire religious group goes far beyond the role of the 70 newspapers that participated in the distribution of the Obsession DVD.

FAIR’s report, “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation,” profiles 12 top anti-Muslim pundits who regularly use misinformation and innuendo to broadcast hate against Muslims. From talk radio host Michael Savage openly advocating killing 100 million Muslims to CNN's Glenn Beck stating that Muslims “will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West” within 10 years, the report unmasks the pundits who have done the most to spread anti-Muslim fear and bigotry in the media.

Other members of the report's "dirty dozen" list include talkshow hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity; activists like Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz; and influential writers like Mark Steyn and Robert Spencer.

Notably, some of the leading members of this network have gone well beyond outrageous statements. From Pipes' campaign against the principal of an Arabic-language public school in New York City, whom he erroneously painted as an extremist, to Malkin's crusade against a Dunkin Donuts ad featuring a scarf that Malkin dubbed a “symbol of the murderous Palestinian jihad,” the leading Islamophobic pundits have also translated their hateful message into action.

The full report is available for download at www.smearcasting.com.