Beck says he he left Fox News last April in part 'to target the youth.' Hey kids, Glenn Beck has a new show

Glenn Beck has been a frequent critic of the left’s “indoctrination” of American children, attacking PBS and calling out Elmo from “Sesame Street” for favoring the redistribution of wealth.

When he left Fox News last April, Beck explained it was in part because he wanted “to target the youth.” And, starting on Monday, he will take direct aim with a children’s show on his new GBTV Internet network with the tea party-friendly name “Liberty Treehouse.”


Beck won’t be the host of the hourlong show, grounded in American history and the day’s news, but it will lead into his own daily 5 p.m. show on the subscription-based network. And politics, long considered a taboo in children’s programming, will be a frequent topic, informed — like everything else on GBTV — by Beck’s populist conservative sensibility.

“In the first show, Raj Nair, the host, in a behind-the-headlines segment, is going to talk about straw polls and debates — what they are, where they come from and why they are important,” said Joel Cheatwood, the former Fox News executive who now serves as president of programming at GBTV. “I don’t know any kids show that took that on.”

The show is a measure of how broadly Beck is stretching his brand now that he is no longer working for anyone but himself in the television arena.

Beck launched GBTV in June after parting ways with Fox News amid reports that his preacher’s style and over-the-top rhetoric — as well as ratings that had fallen from stratospheric to merely high — were causing a problem for the news channel. GBTV’s over-the-Internet, subscription-based business model is a risk but also an opportunity for the mercurial Beck to once again reinvent himself, this time as the leader of a deeper cultural enterprise free of the pressures of the fiercely competitive daily scramble for ratings.

With GBTV, he’s clearly trying to move beyond the image of the Fox fire-breather while still managing to keep the fans he made from that time. “Our goal is to create a network bigger than me with a wide range of programming aimed at different audiences and ‘Liberty Treehouse’ is a great way to kick that off,” Beck said in a statement he gave to POLITICO. “‘Liberty Treehouse’ will not only entertain children and young adults, but it will respect them and their knowledge and passion for history, art, science and current events.”

From all indications, the show, which takes its name from the Boston Liberty Tree that served as a rallying point for the American colonists who protested the Stamp Act, walks a line between innocuous educational fare and tea party dog whistle.

Much of the original content in the hour is the kind of thing you might see on Nickelodeon. Nair, the show’s young and charismatic host, will lead a block of kids’ news, explaining the news stories that parents are talking about, presumably a bit the way Linda Ellerbee does on Nick News. James Rollins, the author of young adult adventure thrillers and a veterinarian by training, will do segments on science. And specials will cover typical topics like peer pressure and bullying.

In its curated content, the network’s cultural colors shine through a bit more. There will be episodes of 1950s television shows like “Ozzie & Harriet” and “Flash Gordon” as well as classic cartoons like “Popeye” and “Superman.”

“We wanted to show some iconic shows that aren’t around much anymore, that really represent a time when values and family were important,” Cheatwood said.

There will also be selections from the “Drive Thru History” series on American history, produced by the conservative evangelical nonprofit National Day of Prayer Task Force and currently linked on the Tea Party Patriots’ Facebook page.

But Cheatwood denies that the nod to the American Revolution-era Liberty Tree in Boston in the show’s name was meant to evoke any connection to the conservative politics Beck has championed. “That never really came into the conversation,” he said. And for Beck’s reinvention to work, Beck will have to go beyond the tea party to become what he has called “bigger than Oprah,” or what The Daily Beast described as a “lifestyle guru for heartland conservatives.”

There are some early signs he may be succeeding.

His two-hour version of the “Glenn Beck” show launched in September with 230,000 subscribers, a better showing than the 156,000 viewers that Oprah’s cable network, OWN, attracted on average in June. It’s a tiny fraction of the roughly 2 million people who watched him during his time on Fox, but with each of his current viewers paying either $4.95 or $9.95 a month, it won’t take too many more viewers for him to replace the revenue from his $2 million Fox contract, even after production costs.

In addition, since leaving Fox, Beck has launched a raft of new businesses through his Mercury Radio Arts company, from a publishing arm called Mercury Ink that saw its first book hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in August to a line of apparel. And that is on top of Beck’s own books, his nationally syndicated radio show, news website The Blaze and events business.

But children’s educational television programming, particularly the iconic kind that appears on PBS, is not exactly child’s play. It’s normally quite expensive to produce because it’s exhaustively tested and researched by people with Ph.D.s in things like developmental psychology. And it rarely, if ever, veers into anything controversial.

“I can’t think of an area that we stayed further away than politics,”said Helen Boehm, a media consultant specializing in children’s educational programming who formerly worked as an executive at Fox Broadcasting and MTV Networks/Nickelodeon.

Cheatwood, who worked at CNN before Fox and became known for making news shows more appealing to younger audiences, admits he has searched mostly in vain for a precedent to what he’s doing. “Trust me, we looked high and low for the game plan and the book we could follow, and didn’t find any,” he said. “We’ve kind of been piecing it together on our own.”

But there is some evidence at least that children in “Liberty Treehouse’s” 10- to 14-year-old target demographic are ready for political programming.

Princeton professor Fred Greenstein, now retired, wrote the seminal book on the matter, “Children and Politics,” based on research he conducted at New Haven schools. He found that political identity is passed from parents to children and that nearly all children in as early as fourth grade were identifying themselves by political party.

“My thesis was that, because these things were inherited, like religious affiliations, they were difficult to change,” he said. “But on the other hand, they were potent.”

And in fact, a Mercury focus group of 7- to 16-year-olds earlier this month found that Beck-loving parents spawned Beck-loving kids to a degree that surprised Cheatwood.

“It’s interesting how much they knew about the Glenn Beck program,” he said. “It kind of shocked me. We anticipated that their parents watched, but these kids really knew about Glenn and his show.”

He thinks it would be “a great thing” if the kids stayed on the couch — GBTV is available through Roku boxes that replicate a typical TV-watching experience — past the end of their hour to watch Beck’s flagship show with their parents.

But Boehm isn’t so sure, given Beck’s track record for muddling some of his historical facts.

“What concerns me is that there’s such a blurring between what’s real and what’s not,” she said. “I’m concerned that kids aren’t always differentiating between what is news and what’s not real. Do they have a fact-checker?”

And Beck’s critics see some hypocrisy in the man who often ominously warns about progressive propaganda moving into the children’s programming space himself.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate that Beck is moving into kid’s programming, as his cable news shows always kind of reminded a lot of people of Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” said Alexander Zaitchik, author of “Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.”

“But it is ironic, after all his ranting about left propaganda aimed at kids, that he’s using the show to drill tots with tea party ideology. I imagine the show will be a sort of anti-Sesame Street, which Beck probably thinks is a socialist-Islamist plot concocted by Frances Fox Piven and the ayatollah in the 1970s.”