Is Glenn Beck losing his mojo?
The controversial talking head still has the highest rated show on cable news at 5 p.m., but some cracks are beginning to show in Beck’s Fox News funhouse mirror -- caused by a combination of factors, including a post-election hangover, a cyclical shift to harder news and his absurd views (even for conservatives) on Egypt -- which could reflect badly on the once-impenetrable Beck Brand.
Beck’s television ratings have been fizzling for some time now.
In January, his FNC show averaged 1.76 million total viewers during the 5 p.m. hour, according to Nielsen estimates - down 39 percent compared to January 2010.
And he scored just 397,000 viewers in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic, a 48 percent slide.
February did not show much improvement. Through Feb. 27 his Fox show is down 26 percent in total viewers for the year (2.06 million compared to 2.89 million last year) and off 30 percent in the demo, averaging 501,000 25-to-54-year-olds vs. 760,000 last year.
Overall, Beck’s show is down 35 percent in total viewers in 2011 (averaging 1.9 million over the first seven weeks, compared to 2.93 million last year) and 44 percent in the demo (447,000 vs. 793,000 a year ago).
Including February, Beck has seen nine consecutive month-over-month declines in total viewers, and seven among 25-to-54-year-olds.
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“There are a myriad of factors that impact month-to-month viewing from news cycles to vacations, weather,” Joel Cheatwood, Fox News senior vice president of development who oversees Beck’s program, told TheWrap. “It's a long list.”
Politics may be at the top of that list.
“Last year was a political year,” TVNewser editor Alex Weprin said. “With the midterm elections looming in November, cable news was obsessed with reading the tea leaves.” It was also the year of the Tea Party, “which Beck made a major part of his shows,” culminating in his “Restoring Honor” that drew close to 100,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in August.
But this year, hard news -- and particularly in the Middle East -- has been the focus of cable news programming, including on Beck's show. “Beck is at his best when he is talking politics, not when he is talking about the situation in Libya,” Weprin said.
Beck’s “strenuous recent efforts to portray the Egyptian revolution as an apocalyptic leftist-jihadist conspiracy have inspired more laughs than adherents,” New York Times columnist Frank Rich argued in a recent column.
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol called a recent Beck rant on the revolution in Egypt "marginalizing" and an act of promoting "hysteria."
“When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left," Kristol wrote, "he's marginalizing himself.”
