The Glen Beck Show loses one third of its audience in 3 months

The latest Nielsen ratings show that Fox’s Glenn Beck show just posted another ratings low for this year. The new mark was set last Thursday when the show attracted 1.82 million viewers. The host's previous low for 2010 had been 1.97 million viewers on April 9.

In the world of cable news his numbers are still very good, and most hosts would be very pleased to have them. But look how far Glenn Beck has fallen recently.

In late January the program was averaging 3 million viewers each week. Late last year the show spent month after month hovering around that figure. Today, the viewership is trending around 2 million, which means that in a span of just three months, Glenn Beck’s show has lost nearly one-third of its television audience.

This must be sending up all kinds of red flags inside Fox News, which already struggles to find any big-name advertisers to fill out the commercials on his controversial show. Corporate America, Beck’s much-loved free marketplace, wants nothing to do with him.

There are more than 200 companies that have gone on the record as saying they will not buy ad time on Glenn Beck's show. They include Applebee's, AT&T, Bank of America, Best Buy, Campbell Soup, CVS, Ditech, Farmers Insurance Group, GEICO, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lowe's, Nutrisystem, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance, RadioShack, Sprint, State Farm Insurance, The UPS Store, Travelers Insurance, Verizon Wireless, Vonage, and Wal-Mart.

What's so bewildering about his huge decline in viewership is that the political landscape has not changed during that time. The Tea Bagger movement that Beck is so closely aligned with is supposedly in the midst of a surge in momentum. President Barack Obama is still doing his best, according to Beck, to ruin America. Democrats are still in charge of Congress and are, in the Beck worldview, ripping up the Constitution. Beck's bogeymen are still in place, yet one-third of his audience has lost interest and tuned out.

Maybe his demented ‘wow factor’ is gone, which might have had viewers tuning in regularly just to see what he'd say and do next. But today sitting through one of Beck’s unbearable, redundant shows feels like sitting through detention. The wow factor is long gone. Whatever originality the show might have once had has been replaced with a suffocating sense of sameness that has completely taken control of the operation.

The precipitous Glenn Beck ratings drop is an astonishing turn of events for a show that's supposed to be at the forefront of a political revolution.