Washington Post Report: Media Matters: Is Glenn Beck the next Alex Jones?

COMMENT: This is a total joke. Media Matters says that the earth is flat and that Alex Jones has no influence. Is that why they constantly monitor Alex and report on him almost daily?

Erik Wemple
Washington Post
July 1, 2011

Watching, following, clipping, fact-checking, ridiculing, and blogging about Glenn Beck have been a wall-to-wall undertaking for Media Matters for America. Fitting, then, that the nonprofit watchdog of conservative media outlets threw a party this week to celebrate Beck’s departure from his suppertime show on Fox News Channel.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Now what? Beck’s profile will shrink as he moves to a pay-per-view platform at GBTV.com. Five bucks will get you a month of the channel’s offerings. Not everyone who skipped over the cable paywall will scale the pay-per-view barrier: Whereas Beck pulled in more than a million viewers per show in his waning days at Fox, reports put his GBTV subscribership at around 80,000.

“His influence will be less and we’ll gauge what we will be doing based on that,” says Ari Rabin-Havt, executive vice president of Media Matters for America. The monitoring, though, will proceed. Someone at the 90-strong organization will be watching and clipping Beck’s pronouncements, both on GBTV and on his radio show.

Yet Beck will no longer be Beck for Media Matters. “The truth is there are a million cranks on the Internet, and he probably will fall into a category like Alex Jones, who has an audience but no influence,”says Rabin-Havt.

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This article was posted: Friday, July 1, 2011 at 5:13 pm

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