Is Glenn Beck the Orson Welles of Our Time?

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2009.

Beck founded Mercury Radio Arts in 2002, the year his talk radio show went national. The name is a respectful nod to the Mercury Radio Theater, the New York drama company founded by Orson Welles, most famous for producing a 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.

Beck's nod to Welles is a revealing one. Like Beck, Welles made his national name scaring the pants off of gullible Americans with a scripted, emotional act. (Unlike Beck, Welles was a staunch leftist and did not incorporate politics into his radio work.) Beck shares Welles' love of dramatic radio and is very proud of the fact that he directed and acted in the first live commercial radio drama in 40 years for XM Radio. Everything Beck does should be seen in this light.

Beck's self-image as an entertainer is rivaled only by his self-image as a businessman. He admits as much in his 2003 book, The Real America, which alternates between shlocky by-the-numbers conservative homily and frank autobiography.

Beck writes that while he admires Welles for dreaming big and revolutionizing radio, he is disappointed that he died poor. Beck finds more to admire in two of Hollywood's most flaming Democrats, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. After sketching the business architecture of Damon and Affleck's Project Greenlight, Beck writes in near-awe:

That's four distinct forms of entertainment, four ways to reach their audience, four products that act as marketing and publicity for each other and four sources of revenue. … This is what Mercury Radio Arts aspires to be … We want to start with the Glenn Beck Program and find ways to … maximiz[e] its ratings and revenue.

If Beck could have built up Radio Mercury Arts on the back of Howard Stern-style shock-jock persona, he would have done it. In fact, that's basically what he tried to do during his "lost" decade spent railing fat cocaine caterpillars off the asses of small-town strippers. And for a while it looked like he was destined for Stern-like stardom. But despite a quick and promising start in radio -- Beck was making six-figures and riding limos in his early 20s -- he bottomed out in 1994 working a tiny market in suburban Connecticut.

He flirted with killing himself, but cleaned up instead and found a new ambition, just as Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich's Republicans stormed Congress and Clinton-era right-wing radio took off, led by Rush Limbaugh. Beck's official biography is spotty on the mid- to late-'90s, but he appears to have spent these years plotting his conservative talk radio makeover.

Beck finally got his big break in 1999. That was the year Clear Channel bought Tampa's WFLA, home to the popular liberal talk legend Bob Lassiter. Lassiter was squeezed out within a year of the sale and replaced by Beck, who jerked Tampa talk radio to the right. He is remembered by locals during this time for his skits depicting Satan writing love poems to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and for dangerously stoking anti-Democrat sentiment in Florida during the tense 2000 election recount.

His new masters were pleased. Just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, 18 months after he took his first caller, Beck signed a national contract with Premiere Radio Networks, a Clear Channel subsidiary. Beck claims that before 9/11, he was "a big fat, lazy sloth who just wanted to sit on my couch eating Ho Hos and Doritos." But that's unlikely. Beck must have been studying conservative talk radio during the late '90s. That, and honing his vision for Mercury Radio Arts, which he launched quickly after the money started flowing again in 2002.

Beck wasted no time positioning himself on the crest of the wave of post-9/11 super patriotism. In March 2003, Beck used his show to organize a series of "Rallies for America," which he attended in stretch limos.

At the time of the rallies, Paul Krugman and others accused Beck of doing the bidding of Clear Channel, which had connections to the Bush administration. But Beck doesn't need anyone to tell him to tour the country and jump on a bunch of stages if it can raise his profile and allow him to out-patriot his competitors.

The "Rallies for America" were the precursor for Beck's newest self-promotional patriotic initiative, the "9/12 Project," which is an attempt to literally stamp his brand on the very memory of 9/11. If this seems shameless, it is. It also makes perfect business sense if you're Glenn Beck.

The post-9/11 period is exactly concurrent with his meteoric and lucrative career on the national stage. He arguably does not exist as a megastar without the attacks on New York and Washington, the wars that followed and their warping effect on the nation's politics and economy. Without 9/11, Beck's newest Premiere contract would almost certainly not be worth $50 million.

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Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer.

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