Slog

News & Arts

The Stranger Suggests

Critics' Best Bets
Music Arts & Food


Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Glenn Beckwatch: The Beginning of the End?

Posted by on Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 11:24 AM

While he still leads his timeslot, Glenn Beck's audience has fallen almost 30% since the beginning of the year.

 

Comments (23) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment
1
Did you girls know Fox News makes more money than CNN and MSNBC and the three broadcast network news divisions COMBINED?
Posted by . on April 29, 2010 at 11:42 AM
Joe Szilagyi 2
@1 and once advertisers see their ratings are dropping, you think those ad revenues will hold at the same rate?
Posted by Joe Szilagyi http://www.joeszilagyi.com on April 29, 2010 at 11:45 AM
3
@1: Since the only conceivable goal of news organizations is to turn a profit, that must mean they're the finest journalistic organization in the history of news coverage.
Posted by Proteus on April 29, 2010 at 11:45 AM
stuckie 4
"Glenn Beck's audience has fallen almost 30% since the beginning of the year."
-and that's just in intelligence! (rim shot)
Posted by stuckie on April 29, 2010 at 11:48 AM
LogopolisMike 5
@4, not really a fair joke.

Underflow errors would certainly make any sort of calculation of those percentages incorrect.
Posted by LogopolisMike http://logopolis.typepad.com on April 29, 2010 at 11:53 AM
Dougsf 6
Ha ha ha, he's #1 in the 5pm time slot. Good Lord that hour paints an abysmal picture of his demo.
Posted by Dougsf on April 29, 2010 at 12:07 PM
Matt from Denver 7
@ 3 FTW.
Posted by Matt from Denver on April 29, 2010 at 12:09 PM
COMTE 8
Not only has his audience fallen 30%, but it has been reported that roughly two-thirds of them can't get up...
Posted by COMTE http://www.chriscomte.com on April 29, 2010 at 12:10 PM
Jaymz 9
Who cares? Don't these television news numbers reflect just a small fraction of the population? I don't watch any television news at all - too much spin and not enough substance. I cast a wide digital net, check sources, balance out the reporting where possible, and find my own news.
Posted by Jaymz on April 29, 2010 at 12:14 PM
Jaymz 10
Oh - and I still read the hard copy of the daily newspaper just because I like the feel of it.

And oh again - @3 is spot on, agreed.
Posted by Jaymz on April 29, 2010 at 12:17 PM
11
@5 That article is only available to subscribers. Here's one publicly available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_…

Explaining it will cause headaches, but for ease of contextual understanding, just think of it as a divide-by-zero error. Get it? They were so dumb to start with, it's hard to calculate the decrease.
Posted by Brooklyn Reader on April 29, 2010 at 12:21 PM
blip 12
even though Fox beats the pulp out of the other cable networks' ratings, they're peak/prime-time viewership is only in the 2-2.5mil range. we're talking about a fraction of a percent of the US population here. it's the beginning of the end of WHO CARES. there are way, way more people who are outraged by glenn beck than there are people who actually take him seriously. it's the perfect love:hate ratio for making a shit-ton of cash (see also palin, sarah), but that's about it.
Posted by blip on April 29, 2010 at 12:34 PM
13
"Fox News Channel finishing first in the cable news ratings race is about as newsworthy as Bruce Springsteen closing a show with "Born to Run."

Nonetheless, that the News Corp.-owned cable channel has finished first in viewers and key demographics for 100 months in a row is something of an achievement. In prime time, Fox News averaged about 1.9 million viewers for the month of April. That beat the combined audiences of MSNBC, CNN and HLN.

Not everyone at Fox News is dancing on top of their desks. Glenn Beck has seen his audience fall almost 30% since the start of the year, from about 2.9 million viewers in January to 2.1 million in April.

While the Beck sensation may be slowing, the decline in his audience has hardly made a dent on the lead he enjoys for his 5 p.m. festival of emotions. His rivals should hold off a little on popping the Champagne.. "

Posted by . on April 29, 2010 at 12:35 PM
14
12
and yet it is 10X the micro fraction of a percent the Liberal whores at MSNBC reach.....

sour grapes mucho?
Posted by . on April 29, 2010 at 12:37 PM
blip 15
"sour grapes?" more like "bemused by peoples' obsession with cable news ratings." fox's and msnbc's collective influence on american politics is ridiculously over-distorted.
Posted by blip on April 29, 2010 at 12:50 PM
gttim 16
"Nonetheless, that the News Corp.-owned cable channel has finished first in viewers and key demographics for 100 months in a row is something of an achievement."

Winning the cable new ratings race is like winning the Special Olympics. Yeah, it is nice, but it is not anything special. All 3 network news prime time newscasts slaughter Fox News in ratings. WWE shows featuring sweaty men in tights screaming and wrasslin' get higher ratings.
Posted by gttim on April 29, 2010 at 12:58 PM
COMTE 17
And despite declining shares over the past decade, network nightly news broadcasts still reach roughly 10 times as many viewers (about 26 mm per day as of January 2009).

Since the talking heads on FOX continue to spew the "myth" of the "mainstream librul (sic) media", I guess that means there are far more people paying attention to it, than to Beck, Hannity, et al.
Posted by COMTE http://www.chriscomte.com on April 29, 2010 at 1:01 PM
18
The correct interpretation of the statistic is "70% of Glenn Beck viewers have not disappeared into off-the-grid militia bunkers."
Posted by thename on April 29, 2010 at 1:06 PM
Reverse Polarity 19
Faux News has a large following, but only because they are the only consistently right-wing news source. They are the sole choice for right wingers.

Mainstream viewers have lots of choices for their news: all the major broadcast networks, CNN, MSNBC, local news stations, etc. So their viewership gets split up among all of those choices.
Posted by Reverse Polarity on April 29, 2010 at 1:29 PM
DavidC 20
Comedy Central has minuscule ratings compared to Fox News and yet everyone I know watches Stewart & Colbert - ONLINE. The same for Maddow and the other MSNBC shows. The future is going to look a lot more like the Young Turks on You Tube than anything Murdoch produces. You know what they say about increasing marketshare in a declining market....
Posted by DavidC http://members.shaw.ca/karenanddavid/ on April 29, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Dougsf 21
Profession Wresting and Spungebob get 10x the viewership, and I'm comforted by the fact that both are probably more informative.
Posted by Dougsf on April 29, 2010 at 2:13 PM
Sir Vic 22
Beck is a burnt out cokehead. He shows many of the signs of "cocaine induced paranoia", as the DSM IV would put it. While it is possible to recover from such a disorder, it's unlikely to happen while he's reading paranoia enhancing Bircher books.

And for a grown man to turn to LDS as a recovery vehicle.... egads. More evidence of a complete disconnect from reality. ("Yeah, that Joe Smith talking into his hat deal sounds like the ultimate in truth!")

Prediction: Beck is old, forgotten news by Election Day 2012. Probably a suicide.
Posted by Sir Vic on April 29, 2010 at 2:46 PM
23
wow, hard to believe that 2/3 of his listeners don't even seem to care whether or not Glenn Beck raped and murdered a 10 year old girl in 1990.
Posted by econoline on April 30, 2010 at 11:13 AM

Add a comment

Advertisement
 

All contents © Index Newspapers, LLC
1535 11th Ave (Third Floor), Seattle, WA 98122
Contact Info | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Takedown Policy