Arriving in bookstores for your Memorial Day beach reading pleasure this weekend is Brooklyn based journalist Alexander Zaitchik's take down of perhaps the biggest media commentator around in 2010, Glenn Beck, in Common Nonsense:Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (Wiley).
We've just began reading it, but we look forward to getting into it this weekend. CL met up with Zaitchek last fall while he was hanging out in Ybor City, writing the book. We got in contact him while researching our article on Beck, and after reading his article on Salon.com about Beck's "enthrallment" with whom Zaitchik calls "Mormonism's most notorious crank", Cleon Skousen.
Zaitchik came down to Tampa to do research on Beck before he went national – where the talk show host began working at 970 WFLA from 1999-2002 and how his career took off and he went national after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Zaitchik ended up meeting a special friend while working here in Tampa, and he also did much of his writing in King Corona on 7th Avenue in Ybor (where he gives a shout out in the acknowledgments section to the staff there). He also credits listening to WMNF as helping him "stay sane", while listening to Beck and sometimes other broadcasters on 970.
Other Tampa notables, such as Joe Redner and Tedd Webb are also featured in Common Nonsense. But less than a year after Beck made the cover of Time magazine, a book like Common Nonsense was crying out to be written, and Zaitchik is a talented and incisive wordsmith up to the challenge.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2010.