- On July 23, 2009, Glenn Beck tells radio listeners that people going “door to door collecting information” would be helping to create a “modern day slave state”.
- During a June 25 interview with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck stated that "there's a lot of people that are concerned" with the census "because they don't want to fill it out. They're not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information. They don't want to give the government all this kind of information."
PS: Salon has a fantastic detailed report on Beck's history and rise as a media figure. The most disturbing thing I read was when he called a station rival's wife after she had a miscarriage live on the air and asked her about it, then said that the man (rival) couldn't do anything right. I don't believe in karma, but one has to wonder when a short while later Beck's daughter Mary suffers strokes as she is born and gets cerebal palsy as a result:
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."
"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
...
Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.
"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."
