The trouble with Beck...

There's just something about Glenn Beck. If you're like me, you may have found yourself flipping through the various American news channels during the highly entertaining American presidential nominee races. You may have also stumbled onto CNN's back-burner station, CNN Headline News, and found yourself face to face with one of their conservative pundits, Glenn Beck.

Beck hosts a talk show on CNN Headline News where he offers his right-wing insights into the going-ons of the world. To put it in a simple Canadian context, he makes PM Harper look like a raving socialist, and Beck will be the first to admit it.

Glenn Beck and I disagree on a wide variety of issues, yet I still find myself drawn into his show. By no means do I rifle through the TV Guide looking for his schedule, but when I run into his show I feel inclined to pay attention. The mystery of why this happens to me has been nagging at me for the past few months.

His show is not especially exciting. He doesn't have entertaining skits; his guests seem to be remarkably boring (and usually in total agreement with Beck); he doesn't have special effect-enhanced visual graphics to awe his viewers. Quite simply, it is Beck talking. He is very one-sided and not afraid to offend anyone, be it liberals or conservatives.

Watching him seems to ignite something inside me, which is perhaps why I'm inclined to watch his show. More often than not I question why I'm watching his 'anti-liberal' rants, similarly to the way that I may question why I'm watching Jerry Springer. But with both of these highly controversial hosts, I just can't seem to turn away very easily. Perhaps it is Beck's politics that fascinate me, or maybe even that someone can believe so strongly in things I believe so strongly against. The uniqueness of Beck is that he is the only one of these conservative talk show hosts that I can't seem to evade. Nancy Grace is just annoying and seems to make accusations rather than report on issues, making it very easy to turn away. The ramblings of Rush Limbaugh are met with the same fate. But Glenn Beck just has a weird gravitational pull.

I can only imagine the scope of Beck's conservative audience (he mentioned his best-selling book for the umpteenth time just this night) but I'm quite curious whether Beck attracts a good number of more left-leaning viewers, or whether I'm simply an entranced phenomenon.