Glenn Beck Demoted On KMBZ Radio, Kansas City

Critic cites youth problem

From Aaron Barnhart, The Kansas City Star

On Monday morning, listeners in Kansas City may have been surprised to hear KMBZ fill-in guy Chris Merrill filling in for Glenn Beck ... for good.

The news-talker yanked "The Glenn Beck Show" from its cozy 9-11 a.m. perch and demoted it to late nights. And in came Merrill, a boomy-voiced libertarian less versed in the conspiracies surrounding George Soros than the rantings of George Costanza.

I did the KMBZ Friday roundtable with Merrill in December, and we talked again last night for a story I'll be writing on him. I like him a lot, and I like what KMBZ is trying to do here — attract a younger listener to a station whose format just naturally skews to older listeners.

It's a tall task for a news-talk station to go young; frankly, few of them seem to try. On the TV side, whether it's MSNBC or Fox News, the viewer is bound to be middle-aged, for whatever reason. (HLN, with its heavy doses of scandal and celebrity, is the exception.)

But the youth problem is really biting Beck right now. The kids aren't taking to Professor Glenn's dumbed-down distance-learning course known as The Left's New World Order for Dummies 101. It's easily lampooned — as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have shown again and again — and the message of fear and suspicion just doesn't click with a generation that, polls show again and again, are more idealistic and open-minded than their parents.

This is especially clear when you look at the precipitous falloff in audience for his Fox News Channel show.

Numbers are in thousands (000). P2+ is all persons ages 2-up, A18-49 is 18-to-49-year-olds.

Read more here.