Glen Beck: Sick, Slick and Cruel

[dmr]

Salon has an enlightening 3-part series on an asshole named Glen Beck.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index2.html

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly's market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. "I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning," remembers Kelly. "When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks -- everything. But I refused to mention Beck's name on the air, which drove him nuts."

Beck kept trying. When KZZP's music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95's two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. "Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him," says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.

"Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks," says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP's program director. "It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention."

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
Quantcast

Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition's begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.

Toward the end of Beck's time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck's rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert's glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP's Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck's voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium's sound system: "The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!" As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing "Y95 Zoo" T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

Moral of Beck's story:
Anything for ratings, fame & fortune - even if it helps destroy lives and a nation.

[DebbieCDC]

1. I read all three parts of this story

Very enlightening -- his whole shtick is based on one thing -- attention for him. He feeds off of being cruel and bombastic because it brings him the attention he craves and that he wants more than anything. Probably all traceable to his mother's death, whether by suicide or accident is not clear.

The best thing to do with blech is ignore him. That he cannot stand.

The more attention he gets for his crazed, lunatic "zoo radio" persona the worse he'll get. He replaced his booze and drug addictions with a public attention addiction. As long as he gets the attention he'll keep pushing the envelope.

[Beaverhausen]

2. He is one sick person

[Nikki Stone1]

3. Does his overweight teabagger base know about how much he hates fat people?

Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show on WHAS, a local AM news-talk station. It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.


Despite the constant goading, Curtis never responded. But being ignored only seemed to fuel Beck's hunger for a response. As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis' named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck's small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings -- "a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck," remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index1.html

[hfojvt]

4. I tried to read part 3

but was completely sickened after about two pages.

[BLUSH]

5. Beck's surreal Cronkite moment ...

[tosh]

6. I watched the Couric interview with him today. He is

a scant couple of notches above Palin in ability to articulate coherent thought. :puke:

[grantcart]

7. k and r

[brettdale]

8. I firmly beleive that Beck is cruel and a Bully

I'm sure as a youngster he would of made fun of disabled kids.

[MrScorpio]

9. I just figured out Glenn Beck's Lonesome Road's moment

It's a doozy

[Cass]

10. Omg, he mocked someone who had a miscarriage!

What a sick jerk.

[Stephanie]

11. That explains everything

Amoral. Unhinged. Sick.

[DinahMoeHum]

18. Lady Karma kicked his ass bloody 2 years later. . .

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index2.html

(snip)
Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."
(snip)

Too bad he didn't take the hint after that. . .

:evilfrown:

[UTUSN]

12. Any thread about BecKKK needs THIS: He's ripping off this OTHER whackjob:: SKOUSEN

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


************QUOTE*********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

*************UNQUOTE************

[JanMichael]

13. If ANYONE deserves a physical beat down it is Beck.

And when I say "beat down" it isn't your typical ass-kicking. It's a life altering realization of life and how fragile it is. I.e. ouch.

What a snivelling fucknut.

[ladywnch]

14. this guy's need for attention is truly pathetic. I'm sure there is some

more sophisticated mental illness diagnosis to be had by people who work in the field but......damn! He really has no conscience regarding his actions, as long as he gets attention. After reading this piece I'm convinced he would be thrilled that someone committed violence after having listened to him. It would mean they were listening to him.....all that matters. He has no sense of right or wrong.....as long as it produces ratings and buzz about him.

He must be the single most insecure person in the world.

[dmr]

15. What a paradox for him

In one way it would validate him, but unable to publicly enjoy it as he has to hide his hand of responsibility.

[newspeak]

16. so, what does that say about his viewers?

He is given access to the public by MSM. Most of his schtick is sick. So, what does that say about some people in this country?

[ladywnch]

17. it says that most of them are gulible beyond belief and think he

believes what he is saying and doing. All the while he is laughing at his chumps all the way to the bank.