Following a series of increasingly hostile public exchanges between Fox News and Glenn Beck’s camp, Beck’s “transition” off of Fox was announced on April 6. Fox recently confirmed that Beck’s final show will take place on June 30.

Glenn Beck’s Fox News exit is the result of a decline in revenue, ratings and relevance.

Revenue

More than 300 advertisers excluded their ads from Glenn Beck’s Fox News program since late July 2009 when he called President Obama a “racist” who has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” In February 2010, the UK broadcast of Glenn Beck’s show began running without any commercials due to advertiser losses abroad.

Subsequent to news of Beck’s departure, The New York Times reported that Fox News saw “the refusal of hundreds Fox advertisers” to place ads on Beck as an issue. This issue was recently highlighted when a Fox News spokeswoman, commenting on Fox’s decision to preempt Beck’s show for a sex scandal special, reportedly quipped that “at least we will be able to sell the special.”

A financial analysis of Glenn Beck’s advertiser losses illustrates two points:

• The number of paid advertisements running on Glenn Beck’s show dramatically declined since advertisers began boycotting his show.
• According to industry data, key advertisements running on Beck’s show cost an estimated one-third to one-sixth of what they cost on other comparable Fox News programs.

The number of paid advertisements on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show dramatically declined once advertisers began boycotting it in August 2009. Sustained pressure on advertisers ensured that Beck’s show never recovered. Consequently, Glenn Beck’s show consistently fell short of other comparable Fox News shows as well as shows of direct competitors:

Source: Industry data obtained from CMAG and analyzed by Media Matters.

Further, based on estimated costs from industry experts CMAG, a Media Matters analysis revealed that the same ad from the same advertiser cost substantially less on Glenn Beck than it does on other comparable Fox News shows:

Source: Industry data obtained from CMAG and analyzed by Media Matters.

Ratings

Glenn Beck’s ratings decline was sharp, significant and sustained.

In the first quarter of 2011, Beck’s total audience dropped by 27% and his target demo audience was down 34% compared to the same period in 2010.
Glenn Beck’s total audience peaked in 2010, sharply fell and continued to wane:

Source: Data compiled from TVByTheNumbers & mediabistro.com and analyzed by Media Matters.

Similarly, Beck’s viewership among the target demo of adults between the ages of 25-54 peaked in 2010 and then faded:

Source: Data compiled from TVByTheNumbers & mediabistro.com and analyzed by Media Matters.

Relevance

In addition to declining ratings and decreases in the ability to generate revenue for Fox News, Glenn Beck also lost relevance:

Since the beginning of 2011, eight radio stations dropped Glenn Beck’s radio show.

• Buckley radio dropped Beck from five of its stations – WOR in New York City and four in Connecticut. Philadelphia’s WPHT, Madison’s WTDY and Milwaukee’s WISN replaced Beck. Further, Kansas City’s KMBZ moved Glenn Beck from his coveted morning slot to a significantly less desirable late-evening slot.

In 2011, conservative leaders began publicly criticizing and marginalizing Glenn Beck:

• Mike Huckabee chided Glenn Beck for having “a massive global conspiracy for pretty much everything” and wrote that “Beck needs to stick to conspiracies that can’t be so easily de-bunked by facts.”
• Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote that Beck is “marginalizing himself” with his “hysteria” over Egypt.
• In the conservative Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner warned that Beck “has become the most disturbing personality on cable television.”
• Other conservative voices publicly criticized Glenn Beck, including Joe Scarborough and Jennifer Rubin.

Just a year prior, the backlash from Beck’s fans would have been too fierce for other conservative voices to publicly challenge him. Yet, due in part to Beck’s declining relevance, these conservatives were able to step up and publicly challenge him.

Notes on graphs

Number Paid Ads Per Month:

• Calculations are based on the primary airing of the broadcast and do not include repeats.
• Situation Room airs 3 hours a day. This data only accounts for the 5-6PM hour, which competes directly with Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.
• Data for MSNBC’s Hardball from February 2010 was unavailable.

Ad Rates (Goldline, Beck vs. Baier, Beck vs. Hannity & O’Reilly):

• Calculations are based on estimated ad costs during the period of January 1 through March 7, 2011.
• In order to ensure the fairest and most direct comparisons as well as relevant results, only data from the show’s primary broadcast was included in the calculations.

Glenn Beck’s Median Monthly Fox News Audience:

• Calculations are based on ratings for Glenn Beck’s Fox News show between January 19, 2009 and June 22, 2011.
• Data for the following individual days was not included in the tally due to unreliability or unavailability: 1/28/11 and 3/11/11. This absence is not statistically signifcant.

Glenn Beck’s Median Monthly Audience, Adults 25-54:

• Calculations are based on ratings for Glenn Beck’s Fox News show between January 19, 2009 and June 22, 2011.
• Data for the following individual days was not included in the tally due to unreliability or unavailability: 1/28/09, 2/4/09, 2/24/09, 3/5/09, 1/28/11, and 3/11/11. This absence is not statistically significant.

Strangely, on his July 25 radio program, Glenn Beck smeared the victims of this tragedy by comparing them to Hitler youth, saying:

“As the thing started to unfold and there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing.”

Needless to say, Beck’s smear was wildly off base. A former press secretary of Norway’s prime minister explained to The Daily Telegraph:

“Young political activists have gathered at Utoya for over 60 years to learn about and be part of democracy, the very opposite of what the Hitler Youth was about.  Glenn Beck’s comments are ignorant, incorrect and extremely hurtful.”

Audio of Beck’s remarks:

Beck is no stranger to smears and outrageous comparisons.  Just a few months ago, Beck claimed that Reform Judaism was akin to “radicalized Islam.”

Update (7/26/11):

On his radio show today, Glenn Beck offered no apology for comparing the victims to Hitler youth. Instead, he defended the use of Hitler analogies, explaining that if we can’t use Hitler comparisons in “logical conversation” then “we are going to be a society of gas chambers.”

Audio:

More than 300 advertisers excluded their ads from Glenn Beck’s Fox News program since late July 2009.  The New York Times reported that Fox News saw “the refusal of hundreds Fox advertisers” to place ads on Beck as an issue that influenced the cancellation of Beck’s show.

Be sure to check out these amazing charts that illustrate the cost of advertisers boycotting Glenn Beck’s show.

Great work all! Onward we go…

This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a “cancer” and a “Nazi.” What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity—not of hope—but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity. I’m no fan of her husband’s policies for sure, but I have appreciated her efforts that Beck misrepresented—either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another “boogey man” hiding in the closet that he and only he can see.

[...]

His ridiculous claim that John McCain and I collaborated and conspired in the 2008 campaign is especially laughable. Is he not aware that McCain and I were competitors—not cohorts? Beck needs to stick to conspiracies that can’t be so easily de-bunked by facts. Why Beck has decided to aim his overloaded guns on me is beyond me. But he ought to clean his gun and point it more carefully lest it blow up in his face like it did this time.

Rawr.

A number of conservative activists and bloggers say they’re furious at media magnate Glenn Beck for what they call content theft. Over the past several years, Beck has relied on video, audio and written content from others to fill his radio and television shows, as well as his websites. Often he has credited his fellow conservatives for their work. Yet in many other instances say dozens of conservative journalists who spoke to The Daily Caller, he has not, often taking elaborate steps to cloak the origins of the material.

Publisher Andrew Breitbart has seen a number of his stories surface on various Beck media properties over the past few years. While he describes himself as “grateful for the many times he has credited me and my sites,” Breitbart says that “sometimes he also uses other peoples’ work without crediting them, making it appear as though it were his own. But especially since adopting ‘The Truth Has No Agenda’ slogan – and trying to deliberately re-position himself as the pious conscience and judge of many of those he took content from – he has exposed himself to his new motto’s unforgiving standard.”

By any standard, Beck seems unusually reliant on the work of others, and unusually reluctant to credit it. In an interview with TheDC, Roger L. Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media, suggested that Beck has committed the journalistic equivalent of a notorious crime. “It is not a question of just doing it right the majority of the time. It is a question of doing it right always,” Simon said. “Doris Kearns Goodwin is forever a fraud in my estimation because she has been caught plagiarizing once. If you rob a bank once, you still robbed a bank.”

A remarkably large number of conservative writers say they feel robbed.

[...]

In February of this year, Beck announced on the radio that he had created a new motto for his website, The Blaze. “This is the slogan that I wrote for The Blaze,” Beck said. “We’ve put it up everywhere here and we’ve written it out for The Blaze. And it is: ‘The truth has no agenda.’”

But in fact, this was not the truth. Beck did not write any such slogan for The Blaze. According to GoDaddy.com website domain name registration records, a man named Michael Opelka bought the domain “truthhasnoagenda.com” in July 2009. Beck has since hired Opelka to work for The Blaze. Shortly thereafter, Beck began selling “The Truth Has No Agenda” merchandise.

Beck’s reputation as an ungenerous user of other people’s work has occasionally surfaced in public. Conservative radio host Mark Levin recently took aim at Beck, whom he refers to as the “5-PMer,” this way: “You won’t find me putting my name on books that other people write. You’ll never find me doing that,” Levin said. “I would never, ever preach to you about principles and viewpoints that I am incapable of writing about. Never.”

The article details many examples of Beck allegedly lifting other people’s work without attribution. These allegations are unsurprising.

Back in March, Thomas Horn, a Metric fan, informed the band that Glenn Beck was using a portion of their song Rock Me Now as bumper music during his radio show.

Well, surprise! Metric didn’t know that Beck was doing this and swiftly took corrective action. And, today, the band announced that Glenn Beck would no longer be using their music as bumper music.

In announcing this, Metric also published the email Metric’s vocalist Emily Haines sent to the fan that alerted them about this matter. Here’s a portion:

Hey Thomas,

Thank you so much for letting us know about this. No, we didn’t give Glenn Beck permission to use our music. That guy’s my nightmare!

When we got your letter, we immediately contacted our publisher with a mortified WTF?? As it turns out, the usage you heard is actually covered by something known as a “blanket license” which allows radio stations to play your music without asking permission first. The idea being, I guess, that every radio station in the world doesn’t have to ask for permission every time they want to play a song from somebody’s album. Instead, they pay a blanket fee to the publisher and can play your music as much or as little as they want.

In this case, since they mercifully only used a few seconds of our song as part of the intro to his talk show, the use was considered “incidental”, which is covered by the blanket license. As they state in their letter below, they were well within their rights. To their credit, they stopped using our song right away when we asked, even though legally they didn’t even have to. Wow, imagine if they hadn’t offered to drop it? I’m really happy I didn’t have to take them on. I have a feeling good old Glenn has one hell of a legal team.

You can read full correspondence as well as the letter from Beck’s legal team here.

Kudos to Metric and thanks to Mr. Horn for taking action here.

As an aside, Metric isn’t the only band to have a bit of trouble with Beck’s forced association. Muse comes to mind.

Onward!

The StopBeck effort gets a shout out on slide #6:

You can check out the rest of the slideshow here.

Onward!

In addition to losing 8 stations, Kansas City’s KMBZ moved Glenn Beck from his desirable morning slot to the less desirable late evening slot. In Beck’s old slot, KMBZ moved in local talker Chris Merrill. After making this move, KMBZ discovered that replacing Beck is actually good for business.

From an April 4, 2011 article in The Kansas City Star:

Four hours before KMBZ-AM began simulcasting on 98.1 FM, Chris Merrill spent a commercial break scrolling through his Facebook page to see if anyone else hated his show.

“Glenn Beck fans,” Merrill said. “Only a couple of them today.”

Earlier in March, the KMBZ fill-in host was given the 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. time slot, replacing the syndicated “Glenn Beck Show,” which was kicked to late nights. Beck Nation responded by calling the new host a “buffoon,” “insulting” and “sick,” among the descriptives we can print.

By last week, however, they’d moved on. Now KMBZ was gearing up to welcome tens of thousands of incoming listeners on March 30, the sales people and listen-at-work types who preferred listening to FM.

“We’re going to have access to an all-new audience,” said Merrill, a father of three school-age kids. “Most of the Gen-X and millennials aren’t used to AM. That’s Dad’s station.”

Something tells me that KMBZ won’t be the last station to discover that Glenn Beck is bad for business and act accordingly.

Onward!

From an April 6, 2011 AP article:

More than 400 Fox advertisers told the company they did not want their commercials on Beck’s show. Beck’s advertisers were dominated by financial services firms, many touting gold as an investment.
[...]

“Advertisers who get weak-kneed because some idiot on a blog site writes to them and says we need to stifle speech, I get a little frustrated by that,” he said.

Given that many of these advertisers spend money elsewhere on Fox News, it’s a bit odd for Ailes to be attacking them this way.

Perhaps Roger Ailes heard about the DropFox campaign and wanted to help?

About DropFox…

DropFox is designed to attach financial consequences to the deceit and vitriol that continues to find a happy home at Fox News. Soon, a comprehensive website will be launched. In the meantime, you can follow @Drop_Fox on Twitter or find DropFox on Facebook here.

From an April 6, New York Times article (emphasis added):

The negotiations that led Glenn Beck to announce his departure from the Fox News Channel on Wednesday ended with an expression of “let’s part as friends,” according to several people with knowledge of the talks. But behind that moment was a torrent of acrimony that underscored just how fractious the relationship between Mr. Beck and the network had become during his three-year run on Fox.

[...]

Beck supporters presented a picture of constant sniping, planted stories about his declining ratings, and discomfort with his ability to build a career for himself outside the Fox News brand.

From Fox’s perspective, the facts about Mr. Beck’s run on the network have been public and indisputable. Among those were the refusal of hundreds of Fox advertisers to allow their commercials to be placed on Mr. Beck’s program, and a history of incendiary comments that attracted harsh backlash, including one where the host called President Obama a racist and another where he compared Reform Judaism to radical Islam. (He later apologized for both comments.)

Mr. Ailes suggested in the interview Wednesday that he was happy with the departure being characterized as either a cancellation or a decision by Mr. Beck to quit. Fox has retained all its other high-rated hosts in the past, but they didn’t come under the intense scrutiny that Mr. Beck has faced, nor the mass opposition from advertisers.

[...]

At times, Mr. Beck and his managers said they sensed that Fox was retaliating in public, although they did not prove it.

Ah, so, Glenn Beck’s advertiser losses did matter. Imagine that.

Unfortunately, the NYT continues to pretend that Glenn Beck’s advertisers magically disappeared. But, participants in the StopBeck effort know better. It took teamwork (StopBeck participants and groups like Color of Change, Media Matters, Faithful America, Jewish Funds for Justicem, etc..) and persistence in order to deliver this accountability.

Great work all. Onward!