The most recent Media Matters newsletter (9-26-2009) discusses how Glenn Beck has commandeered the position—formerly held by Matt Drudge—of setting the newsroom agendas for the mainstream media.
Well, maybe they should pick up on this story—by Salon’s Alexander Zaitchik—and make a big deal of it for a few days. I don’t think Glenn Beck would like that.
Not exactly buried in the article, but far down enough that Internet-reading “skimmers’ might have missed it, is this astonishing anecdote:
The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” for Halloween—a recurring motif in Beck’s life and career—Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. “A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right—about he can’t even have a baby.”
“It was low class,” says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. “There are certain places you just don’t go.”
I really hope this vile story gets tweeted, Facebooked, digg’d, reddited, rises to the top of the meme pile and just gets plain talked about. How will Glenn Beck’s Christian “followers” react to hearing this story? It’s so UNfunny, so UNcalled for and just… idiotic and maliciously CRUEL! What a psychotic slimeball Glenn Beck is.
WHO says things like this to someones face, let alone ON THE RADIO?? The apparent answer—and there are quite a few witnesses to this doozy—is Mr. Glenn Beck.
I can’t wait to see Beck try to explain this one away and I really hope Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Huffington Post and other progressive media outlets run with this one and decide to call him out on it. Talk to Terry Kelly. Get her on the air and ask her what it felt like to have Glenn Beck ridicule her and her husband on the radio after she’d had a miscarriage. Ask Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin what they think of this story!
I’ll bet it would make RIVETING television! Slow news day this weekend? Here’s one right over the plate for ya!
Beck will no doubt pull out his by now threadbare excuse that he was an alcoholic with a death wish back then, but did this leopard really change his spots? Really?
And the evidence would be… what?
As one Internet wag commented, “How batshit crazy do you have to be to make Bill O’Reilly seem well-adjusted?” Glenn Beck, you put shit into the world to enrich yourself, riling up low IQ people with lies that you don?