The Right & the Wrong

He'll tell you the ugly stories. Like the time at a now-defunct radio station in Baltimore, when he fired a guy for bringing him the wrong pen. (He wanted a Sharpie for signing autographs at a live event, not a ballpoint.) In 1991, Beck was unemployed and so notorious a prima donna that the only job he could get was in Hartford, Conn., where he hosted a morning show and managed three stations. It was a fraction of his past money and profile, a career cul-de-sac that provoked even greater acts of obnoxiousness and self-destruction.

"That station was a pretty cancerous place to be," recalls Pat Gray, Beck's best friend and his radio co-host in both Baltimore and Hartford. "I mean, I had the feeling that he was going to fire me."

Bottom came after one booze-induced blackout, when his daughters asked him to finish a bedtime story he didn't remember starting. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous, got divorced and found his second wife, Tania, who agreed to get married only if they jointly found a religion. They shopped for a theology, even checking out the local synagogue, which Beck sort of enjoyed. "You're in and out on Saturday, got the whole weekend in front of you," he says with a shrug.

The couple settled on Mormonism, which Beck now calls "the most important thing in my life." Without it, he says, he'd be drinking again and he'd lose sight of what is actually important.

But if Beck has left jerkdom for good, what explains that Keith Ellison question?

"If I could take back the wording of that question, I would," he says, sounding genuinely contrite. He then says he was trying to make the point that moderates of every religion -- his included -- need to face down the extremists in their flock. How exactly his "prove to me" challenge was supposed to tease out that point is a mystery.

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Of course, the no-he-didn't interview style, as well as Beck's strange confection of lectures, self-deprecation and one-liners, is what earned him a ticket to Headline News. The suits at the channel have long cast an envious eye on Fox's superior ratings, and in 2004 they started tinkering with their all-news format for the first time in 23 years. The perpetually enraged Nancy Grace was one of the first acquisitions. Beck is the most recent.

"What amazed me about him is that he was the number-three-rated radio talk show in the country, and he wasn't [on the air] in three of the biggest markets in the country -- Chicago, New York and Los Angeles," says Ken Jautz, who runs Headline News. "And we thought that his style, tone and sensibility would work on TV."

Maybe an attention-deficit host is exactly what an attention-deficit public wants. Listen to a few of Beck's shows and what strikes you most is the enormous ratio of words to substance -- how Beck can monologue for minutes at a time and leave behind almost nothing except the impression of great vehemence.

It's striking, too, how Beck can contradict himself without even noticing. On the same day as his pornography segment, Beck exults over news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called him "CNN's chief corporate fascism advocate," evidently because he thinks Beck is a global-warming skeptic. Not true, says Beck, and though he's flattered by the attention, he's irked that Kennedy apparently hasn't bothered to watch his show. (Kennedy, in a brief interview, says he recalls Beck voicing doubts about global warming a few weeks back.) "The point here is that people who disagree with me don't actually watch or listen to this show," Beck tells his viewers. "They're hearing what they think I would say, what they think someone like me -- you know, a conservative hatemonger -- would say."

From there, Beck segues to an interview with conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza, who has come to discuss his new book, "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11."

"Dinesh, I have to tell you, I'm disappointed in this book," he says, by way of an opener.

Then, casually, Beck makes a rather startling admission: He hasn't read D'Souza's book.