Yeah, yeah, even I get tired of all the posts about Glenn Beck (most of which I make), but this one was pretty funny:
http://www.inebriateddiscourse.com/2010/01/glennbeck2.html
Excerpt:
New York—In a stunning admission that is likely to send shockwaves throughout the American media, “Glenn Beck” announced on Sunday that his radio and television shows are part of an elaborate social experiment to find out whether he could “make the crazy seem plausible to millions of people.”
“This has been an incredibly disturbing experience for me,” said Peter Morton, a.k.a. “Glenn Beck.” On Sunday, Morton revealed in a press conference and Q&A with reporters that he is a sociology professor at the University of South Florida who has been on sabbatical for ten years, during which time he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show and two cable television programs as part of a major academic research project. Morton said he has authored an upcoming book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid, which describes his experiences as one of the preeminent right-wing talk show hosts in the United States.
“I cannot continue the charade any longer,” a visibly shaken and broken Morton read from a prepared statement. “This has gotten way out of hand. I started this experiment ten years ago with honest intentions, to test the credulity of the American public, and to try to gain a deeper understanding of the political psychology of the American people. Today, my experiment ends, and my search for a therapist begins.”
Morton said his experiment commenced in 2000, when he used his connections in the radio industry to secure an afternoon show on WFLA in Tampa. “By that time,” said Morton, “I had already published several peer-reviewed papers on the sociology of politics, so I came up with an alias. Americans gravitate towards people with short names that are only one or two syllables long. Notice that Obama is the first president since JFK to have a last name that’s more than two syllables, and only the third major presidential candidate since 1972 with a three-syllable name, [McGovern, 1972 and Dukakis, 1988] so I eventually settled on ‘Glenn Beck.’”
When the Glenn Beck Program premiered in 2000, Morton espoused moderately conservative views. However, as time progressed, Morton said he realized that in order to maintain ratings that would keep him on the air, he would have to “up the ante.” Gradually, Morton went from a reasonable but obscure radio show host to a right-wing fringe figure broadcast over 280 stations nationwide by 2008.
“This endeavor was only supposed to last six months, a year, tops. I was planning on losing money because I was funding it myself,” said Morton. “The next thing I knew, I was making millions of dollars for saying the craziest stuff I could possibly think of. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I had never done so little actual work in my life and here I was raking in more money than I had ever seen. But on the other hand, it was frightening to know that there was such a huge market for this. And then HLN called me one day asking if I’d want to host a TV show. A TV show!”
http://www.inebriateddiscourse.com/2010/01/glennbeck2.html
Excerpt:
New York—In a stunning admission that is likely to send shockwaves throughout the American media, “Glenn Beck” announced on Sunday that his radio and television shows are part of an elaborate social experiment to find out whether he could “make the crazy seem plausible to millions of people.”
“This has been an incredibly disturbing experience for me,” said Peter Morton, a.k.a. “Glenn Beck.” On Sunday, Morton revealed in a press conference and Q&A with reporters that he is a sociology professor at the University of South Florida who has been on sabbatical for ten years, during which time he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show and two cable television programs as part of a major academic research project. Morton said he has authored an upcoming book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid, which describes his experiences as one of the preeminent right-wing talk show hosts in the United States.
“I cannot continue the charade any longer,” a visibly shaken and broken Morton read from a prepared statement. “This has gotten way out of hand. I started this experiment ten years ago with honest intentions, to test the credulity of the American public, and to try to gain a deeper understanding of the political psychology of the American people. Today, my experiment ends, and my search for a therapist begins.”
Morton said his experiment commenced in 2000, when he used his connections in the radio industry to secure an afternoon show on WFLA in Tampa. “By that time,” said Morton, “I had already published several peer-reviewed papers on the sociology of politics, so I came up with an alias. Americans gravitate towards people with short names that are only one or two syllables long. Notice that Obama is the first president since JFK to have a last name that’s more than two syllables, and only the third major presidential candidate since 1972 with a three-syllable name, [McGovern, 1972 and Dukakis, 1988] so I eventually settled on ‘Glenn Beck.’”
When the Glenn Beck Program premiered in 2000, Morton espoused moderately conservative views. However, as time progressed, Morton said he realized that in order to maintain ratings that would keep him on the air, he would have to “up the ante.” Gradually, Morton went from a reasonable but obscure radio show host to a right-wing fringe figure broadcast over 280 stations nationwide by 2008.
“This endeavor was only supposed to last six months, a year, tops. I was planning on losing money because I was funding it myself,” said Morton. “The next thing I knew, I was making millions of dollars for saying the craziest stuff I could possibly think of. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I had never done so little actual work in my life and here I was raking in more money than I had ever seen. But on the other hand, it was frightening to know that there was such a huge market for this. And then HLN called me one day asking if I’d want to host a TV show. A TV show!”
