Glenn Beck's Massa Mess Derails Audience Credibility

THE CIRCUS TENT FOLDS

Ill-Fated Interview Decision Decimates Remaining Credibility







The Glenn Beck Circus has officially folded its tent.

Though the host himself, networks that employ him and some supporters may not know it yet, yesterday's hour-long on-air spectacle with scandal-plagued former Rep Eric Massa (D-NY) marks the likely beginning of the end for this two-bit carnival huckster.

Already, the left is ridiculing his botched act, using Beck's postmortem analysis from today's radio show.

Saving Beck so far is the unwillingness of many key conservatives to condemn Beck for fear of a backlash from his fans. Will that pattern soon end? Yesterday's debacle certainly opened the door.

Just as important is whether our state-run media friends who've spent so much time creating the image of Beck as conservative ringleader will now work to bring him down and hope for accompanying damage to the movement.

With all the hype of a circa-1980s Geraldo Rivera special, Beck revealed his vault was as empty as Al Capone's. Time Magazine's Michael Scherer pegs it here:

Massa had come on Fox to out-Beck Glenn Beck. Armed with the very same weapons — a deep sense of victimhood, outrage at the powers that be and remarkable personal candor — the Representative delivered a dizzying confessional. He admitted to sexless groping and tickling of his staff, sending inappropriate text messages and otherwise failing to behave like a Congressman should, all as he made his case that his fellow Democrats had really gone after him because of his previous no vote on health care reform. "I can't fight this. I can't fight cancer," Massa announced, in a classic stream-of-consciousness ramble. "I can't fight the White House. I can't fight the Democratic Party." (See TIME's cover story "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?")

Beck, who is used to controlling the gravitational force of victimhood around him, kept interrupting to point out that he was a bigger target of even greater forces than Massa. "I have two unauthorized biographies coming out against me in the spring," Beck said at one point. Minutes later, Beck went even further. "Do you realize my family is at stake?" he said. "You've got a little scandal with your children in college. I've got one for all time now, because I am not going to resign. I'm not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe at some point the system will destroy me."

But Beck could not compete with the oddity of the sympathy card Massa kept pulling. He appeared frustrated that Massa wasn't revealing any more sinister plots afoot in the nation's capital, and he got visibly annoyed when Massa tried to take some measure of responsibility for his actions and attempted to walk back some of his more heated rhetoric against White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

And to make things worse, when Massa turned from discussing his own woes to the machinations of Washington, he offered ideas that have no place in Fox News's tightly regulated framework. Massa suggested that Beck and other Americans demand "campaign finance reform" to curb the corruption on Capitol Hill. Beck, who has called such proposals a "huge mistake," put his hand over his mouth, as if he were holding back an upset stomach. Massa, who has opposed Obama's health reform because it is not liberal enough, told Beck that he should stop calling people names like "socialist" and "communist." "You can be a progressive and be a fiscal conservative," Massa then explained, as Beck lost control of his own program.


[...]


But in Massa, Beck found a sort of liberal doppelgänger, a mesmerizing train wreck of a man who was impossible to undercut in the classic fashion. To many conservative allies of Beck, it probably didn't come as too much of a surprise. In recent days, prominent Republicans like Bill Kristol had expressly warned Beck and others about coming to Massa's defense just because he was alleging dirty tricks by the Obama White House. "We shouldn't get into the business of being pro-Massa just because we are anti–health care," Kristol said on Monday on Fox. The ruling talk-radio king, Rush Limbaugh, spent much of Tuesday making clear that he would not be tied to Massa, after spending much of Monday praising Massa's revelations about Democratic Party politics. "Anybody who embraces this guy is in big trouble," Limbaugh said.


[...]


But Beck, who thrives on publicity stunts and controversy, could not resist engaging with Massa. On Tuesday morning, during his radio show, Beck compared the Democrat to both a mobster wanting to testify against John Gotti and a potential Soviet spy wanting to "cross over to our side." The conservative blogger Michelle Malkin called into the show to tell Beck he was making a mistake. "This guy deserves 60 minutes of our time, really?" Malkin asked.

Beck would not budge. But as those 60 minutes came to an end on Tuesday afternoon, the rabble-rouser seemed to recognize that he had fallen into a trap. The Beck big top has room for only one carnival barker at a time. "I think I have wasted your time," Beck said, staring into the camera at an audience he once spent weeks telling about fanciful FEMA prison camps. "I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time."

Many fans looked the other way when Beck revealed his support for the widely-discredited global warming theory, not to mention his now-infamous assertion that Obama is better for the country that McCain would have been as president. But yesterday's program revealed to all that the emperor truly has no clothes. Will loyal supporters continue to ignore the warning signs?

For the sake of the movement, key conservative leaders must break their silence and openly denounce Beck's distracting sideshow now before Beck is able to undercut gains in November's election.


HAVE YOU SEEN our companion site for New England regional talk radio updates?



Amazon orders originating with clicks here benefit The Radio Equalizer's ongoing operations. Your PayPal contributions keep this site humming along. Thanks!