Glenn Beck's show the worst on Television

reply to post by centurion1211


Centurian, your man is going down. Afraid of Porky Pig in spiky hair? Hahahaha

I'm not surprised Glenn Beck is kind of freaking out over the fact that Media Matters continues to remind people that the Fox News host's ratings are swooning in 2010, and that he's lost one-third of his audience this year, as well as hit a couple low-water marks on the Nielsen scorecard. I'm not surprised he's taking it personally and lashing out because Beck is, at heart, a radio guy and radio guys are wired when it comes to ratings. Ratings are how they judge people and how they themselves are judged. ("Great spring book!")

So I'm sure it's painful for Beck to see the numbers go down, to know that people are noting the precipitous drop, and there's no doubt a mounting fear that people are judging him because of his sliding Nielsen numbers. And so yes, that's why he's been spinning the story pretty hard.
Beck, from last night's Fox News show [emphasis added]:

It was Media Matters, by the way, who first started the lie that we could read in, I think, the LA Times and then The Washington Post ... the little story came from Media Matters that my ratings were down on this program. Well, now we can tell you 'cause the official ratings are out, May to May, and it's weird. They're down so far that they are actually up 22 percent. Sounds like a smear campaign with no facts at all.


Trust me, if my claim that Beck had lost one-third of his audience this year was a fact-free smear campaign, Fox News would have buried Media Matters, as well as every TV industry reporter and blogger, in a blizzard of press releases detailing exactly how Beck's ratings were not down -- they were up! Fox News, like every major cable outfit, has an entire division of its communications/research team that does nothing but churn out press releases to prove just how amazing and fantastic its ratings are.

But I wrote a story detailing how Beck's ratings were down 33 percent this year, and the story, as Beck mentioned, was widely circulated and got picked up in the press -- yet it was crickets from Fox News. The pushback, aside from Beck's own mini-temper tantrums, was non-existent. Nada. Zilch.

Why? Because the numbers don't lie. Beck can go on TV every night and repeat "George Soros" 25 times if he wants (or however else he thinks he's going to cast doubt on Media Matters with his viewers), but that's not going to change the Nielsen numbers. And guess what? Glenn Beck has lost one-third of its TV audience since January. Even though he's supposed to be the all-powerful media leader of a political revolution.

But let's take a closer look at Beck's claim about his May-to-May ratings. Is it true? Is Glenn Beck up 22 percent, as he host seemed to suggest last night?

Not really. Because what Beck does in order to produce that 22 percent jump is take the first two-plus weeks of ratings for May 2010 -- when Glenn Beck only appears Monday through Friday -- and compares them to the first two-plus weeks of May 2009 -- when Beck's show appeared Monday through Saturday, and when his Saturday show recorded ratings significantly lower than his weekday shows. In other words, Beck is cooking the books. The May 2009 ratings are weighed down by his dismal Saturday numbers, which means that when compared with Saturday-less May ratings from 2010, the 2010 numbers look better. In this case, 22 percent better.

What if you factored out the poorly rated Saturday shows from May 2009? In that scenario, Beck's audience has grown more like 8 percent, May-to-May.

And I mean, c'mon, could Beck have picked a smaller window of ratings (two weeks in May?) to focus on in order to manufacture an increase? So no, that modest May boost doesn't mean Glenn Beck is flying high. Moreover, if you look at the ratings for an April-to-April comparison, those numbers