When I first heard Glenn Beck in 2002, I knew instantly that he came from this particular radio world.  The effect was Limbaugh on ADD. 

It strikes me that this is the first of several components in the shaping of Beck’s persona, and this book suggests that you can follow the path of his radio ratings and career advancment on how he shaped himself.  Personal problems and issues aside, I can actually take the career move from Morning Zoo to Talk radio as a rather straight-forward desire to change career projections — he started in radio playing for Top 40 radio something like Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” and finished by playing Britney Spears — you understand how you can become sick of moving with a trend-line marked by a particular age group you lose more connection to with each passing minute.

But it is curious to learn how close Beck’s launch-pad into national talk fame came to failure.  As it says in Beck’s promotional material — he landed in Tampa Bay in 1999 and quickly grabbed the #1 rated local talk radio show.  And as those in the know can tell you, there is a punchline there in its concealment, something pierced with the simple question “And who was #2?”  Media deregulation and corporate consolidation worked its way in a very acute way in Tampa — Clear Channell acquired another major radio ownership corporation, and these two companies happend to together have owned several more stations than legally allowed by one corporation.  So Clear Channel sold excess stations in such a way as to avoid direct competition — Tampa has itself a new Spanish language station! — and liquidated some local talk radio talents to go with the cheap flow of national syndication.  Glenn Beck was number one by default, which wasn’t to say he didnt’ — until the end — struggle commercially at the number one slot.

The first transformation in his persona came as he moved from a generally conservative and obviously Republican voting record host with a bent more toward some morning zoo pack of stunts over to your rigid partisan warrior.  Beck had replaced a local liberal radio host with a long time devoted following, and the thing that the local Clear Channel executives could tell their disappointed listeners was to give the new guy a chance, assuring them he wouldn’t be a cookie-cutter clone of the ditto-head dominated AM Dial.  It is interesting to see that I actually remember reading about an act he did at the time  (though I don’t think the piece referenced Beck) at the time in a “Death of Radio and New Lows in Radio Culture” themed piece.  He would alert the audience that he would, in a future segment, come out on a preposterous and outrage provoking position, and have callers chime in agreeing with him — for purpose of fake debate with outraged listeners not in on the joke.  This is an area in radio trends that belong more to a variety of pranksters than your Hannity — though I guess I have to say it is not too different in theme to a favorite of mine, Phil Hendrie, so maybe I’m a hypocrite is offering that this sounds stupid.
Near the end of the road, knowing he had to find a ratings boost to keep his career alive, he kept in mind advice from a consultant to jump full frotal on the next local news story of national resonance.  The 2000 election came, and with it the Recount.  It was this story that Beck projected himself into the limelight, and also garnered a local audience by becoming a Partisan Warrior — fighting and exposing the treachery of Team Gore.  24 News Channels having 24 hours to fill, it seems you could grap a seat at the table by being a media personality in one of the three key spots in Florida, and so it was with Beck.
He followed down the new found Partisan Warrior in championing Terri Schiavo — noteworthy in that he did a 180 in his opinion, noteworthy too in that in both instances the opinions were rather tastelessly expressed.
The next media news event, and the one that bolted him onto national radio, was 9/11.  In the immediate post-fully news coverage period of 9/11, Clear Channel had a need to provide feed for their host of stations with (Republican conservative) generally political topic talk radio station, all beating their chests for God Country and War on Terror, but with shows on the schedule such as Dr. Laura.  So, under the umbrella of “America Under Attack”, they gave the nation Glenn Beck as a temporary stop-gap.  This sampler served beneficial for his more proper syndication launch.

You can spot the next crucial ingedient in Beck’s brand making as coming in part from having his network of stations leaning on small to medium sized markets, and not LA NY Chicago.  With this, he discovered the “Heartland”.  To a large degree, they all have this line, but he came to beat this one in a heavy handed manner.  The cover of his first book:
  — which strikes me as rather artificial and contrived.  (I note that the latest edition he has changed to having him hold out an apple pie — this suggests a note of self-awareness that he can’t get away with this.  Or perhaps a note of irony in that the tropes now have understood quotations around them.)
It is here that we see his particular synergy with a Sarah Palin and the nationalistic “Tea Party Express” strain of Tea Party-dom.  He built this brand with his “Rally for America” tour, at the time blasted as seemingly a Clear Channel — connected to Bush conspiracy of wartime propaganda.  These were at once war protest protests with glitzy country music performances (“Put a Boot in your Ass”, remember?).  It was also more to the point a Beck promotional tour, where he pounded away to his fans that he was, as they were, a “Real American” coming out of the “Real America”.  I am surprised that author Alexander Zaitchik didn not mention at this juncture a central irony in this construction — in setting off a designated “Real America” out in a fly-over country of rural and exurban lands, the inhabitants of New York City — scene of the tragedy which prodded and enforced the need to assert the dichotemy — falls into the “Phony American” category.

I can anticipate the next major transformational ingredient in Beck’s radio persona, though have not read far enough in the book to get to it.   I can provide the outline already, though, as this is where he came into his own.  It comes with Cleon Skousen.  The last major key in the shaping of Beck is the conspiratorial element — the shadowing into someone like Alex Jones.  I can suggest that part of this comes with the oppositional line that comes within the 2006 falling of public esteem of the party that he was partisan warrioring for — which was and is, after all, the Party of Real America.  It is this equivalent of pounding away at Vince Foster’s suicide in the 1990s.  The other part comes from the shock of the 2008 Fiscal Crisis and the campaign and election of that man — Barack Obama.  From his persona built around something to the effect of “I’m you” — just a guy trying to find answers in this crazy world of ours where something has gone off-base, he breathlessly lead his fans on a crash-course of studious discovery with a supposed “Great Books” program, learning alongside everyone else “what’s really going on out there”.

It is one paint job made over another — and each item is still there.  Just under his chalkboard filled with the name of the foundations secretly running the world is lurking him standing on a stage with a Jumbo-tron of video of George W Bush saluting the Troops.  Just under that is the PJ Barnum showsman searching for an angle, who knows how to work a crowd.  His core does make him distinct from someone like Hannity, but it somewhat bounds him.

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