Glenn Beck Inc - n his empire there's the ideology--and then there's the money machine

[swag]

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0426/entertainment-fox-news-simon-schuster-glenn-beck-inc.html

With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company," Beck says. He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. He gets $13 million a year from print (books plus the ten-issue-a-year magazine Fusion). Radio brings in $10 million. Digital (including a newsletter, the ad-supported Glennbeck.com and merchandise) pulls in $4 million. Speaking and events are good for $3 million and television for $2 million. Over several days in mid-March Beck allowed a reporter to follow him through his multimedia incarnations, with one exception, his 5 p.m. daily show on Fox News, which attracts just under 3 million viewers. (FORBES has a relationship with that channel via Forbes on Fox.)

By now everyone knows Beck's curriculum vitae--at least, the hideous details (which he doesn't hide) of his drug and alcohol addictions and the pettiness of firing an assistant for supplying a pen he didn't like for signing autographs. In the popular mythology his career was born twice: first after Sept. 11 (his national radio show, The Glenn Beck Program, launched officially in January 2002); then again when Barack Obama was inaugurated (his Fox News show first aired two days before, on Jan. 19, 2009). The summary omits a few details of his climb to fame and, more important, to fortune.

Raised in Mount Vernon, Wash., just north of Seattle, Beck received a present from his mother on his eighth birthday that changed his life: a record collection of Depression- and World War II-era radio productions. When he wasn't putting on magic shows, Beck imitated radio voices into a handheld recorder. At 13 he won a contest that got him a guest gig on Mount Vernon's am station, KBRC. Two years later his life began to unravel after his mother, an alcoholic, died in a boating accident that Beck has since judged a suicide. He started drinking and smoking a lot of pot. "I had convinced myself that I was going to repeat my mother's life, that it was all genetic," he recalls. "It gave me permission to get even worse." By age 18 he was crisscrossing the country, serving as a Top 40 deejay in markets that took him to Provo, Utah; Washington, D.C.; Louisville, Ky.; Phoenix; Houston; Baltimore; and New Haven, Conn., where he cratered.

Married, with two kids, Beck barely held things together; ratings at New Haven's KC101 were sinking, and his salary and responsibilities were being slashed. "Every single minute of every single day was a struggle for me," he says. His worst moment: blacking out at night, then breakfasting the next morning with his kids when "they said, 'Dad, Dad, that was the best one ever, tell us that story again.' I realized that not only could I not remember the story, I didn't even remember tucking them in." Beck took himself to Alcoholics Anonymous. But he credits Tania, his second wife, whom he met three or four years later, for pulling him out of the deep ditch. At her insistence they shopped around for a church and became Mormons.

. . .

"I don't necessarily believe that is reflective of his own personal politics--I don't even know if he has personal politics," says Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade magazine devoted to talk radio. "I see him as a performer."

. . .

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Too bad noon of his followers will read that....

It would just be a shame for them to find out their "leader" is nothing more than a flimflam man...the Elmer Gantry of the 21st Century.

[lame54]

2. he should have stuck to the alcohol and pot

[Moostache]

3. Well, so much for the "gateway drug" argument!

If there were ANY justice inherent to the universe, Beck would have graduated from pot to blow to smack during that time and would have been found cold and stiff with a bloody needle hanging out of his arm. If marijuana was truly a "gateway" then a total addict like Beck would have gladly walked right through to the other side and never come out...

[Martin Eden]

4. Makes me want to VOMIT

Beck getting $$ millions for spreading his hateful LIES :puke:

[ezmerelda39]

5. Beck is still drunk..

only this time around it is with power, not alcohol. He knows that his craziness brings in money, lots of money. The crazier he gets the more people watch him and the more people watch him the crazier he gets. It doesn't matter how crazy, only that it turns the money machine. The fact that people buy into his craziness is isn't crazy, it is terrifying.