The Media

Beck’s Ratings

They're saying that Glenn Beck's ratings on FOX News Channel are good, as opposed to Glenn Beck's formerly sucky ratings on Headline News. Nevertheless, I have a complicated theory to explain this.

Here goes: If you say deliberately outlandish and crazy things every day, people tend to stop and look. Beck has stumbled onto this formula. He's taken the usual level of stupid and crazy found elsewhere on FOX News, and amplified it. That doesn't make him necessarily important or serious. It just makes him that very crazy guy with the punch-me face who says very crazy things.

Put another way: who gets more attention on the street? A guy in a suit talking on his cell? Or a guy who just set himself on fire while screaming about how the moon landing was faked?

Not such a complicated theory after all.