At Newsbusters, Noel Sheppard writes, “It’s certainly not surprising that the New York Times would publish a hit piece on Glenn Beck, but coming hours after CNN’s Howard Kurtz spent almost ten minutes bashing the Fox News commentator makes me smell a rat:”
On Thursday, Beck garnered almost two million total viewers. Not only is that more than his combined “competition” on CNN, HLN, and MSNBC, it is more than any show on those networks gets at any time of the day.
Frankly, no one is even close.
Within his own network, Beck’s numbers are consistently higher than Shepard Smith’s and Greta Van Susteren’s while typically being on par with Bret Baier’s and Sean Hannity’s. Only Bill O’Reilly consistently bests Beck.
Is that the kind of commentator you want to get rid of?
Noel wonders if there isn’t some sort of JournoList-style collusion behind the scenes to ramp up the attack on Beck.
By the way, note the conclusion of the Times’ hit piece:
“When I first came here,” he told his audience on Wednesday, “I had this pie-in-the-sky belief that if I told you the truth, if I verified all of my facts and double-checked, and we could make that compelling case with facts to back it up, the journalists in other places would get curious and they’d use their resources and they’d investigate and they’d prove it right and they’d show it too.” Then he shook his head and laughed bitterly.
Mr. Beck remains firm in his belief that something is going terribly wrong and it may be time to stock up on canned goods and head to the basement. The problem with predicting doomsday is that if you’re wrong, you have to figure out what to say the next day.
Really? That never stopped the enviro-left; they knew that up until recently, no one — especially at the New York Times — was going to call them on their doomsday forecasts.
Remember, we only have ten years to stop saying that we only have ten years to save the world!
(Incidentally, a newspaper with a pundit who calls for refighting World War II to jump the start the economy and simultaneously sees the parallax view in political clip art, and a book reviewer that declared conservatism dead, one year before the Tea Party movement helped the GOP to recapture Congress might want to remove the mote in their own eye first, before engaging in outside media criticism.)
Meanwhile, for a guy whom the Times thinks is about to go in through the out door at Fox, he’s busy expanding his own company — which might mean that Beck’s assuming that the 1099s from Fox will be continuing for some time to come.
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