Loud and opinionated, just what CNN wants

NEW YORK -- The set of Glenn Beck's talk show on CNN Headline News looks like the rooftop patio of a posh apartment, complete with simulated bricks and a huge photo-realist mural of a SoHo block. Beck is standing in the middle of this fake aerie, riffing about porn.

He avoids X-rated movies and magazines, he says, but won't offer the righteous condemnations you'd expect from the God-fearing conservative that he constantly reminds viewers he is. Porn isn't for him -- but neither is legislating morality.

"I'm just trying to live the best life I know how to," he explains, gesticulating in his somewhat manic style. "For example, I'm an alcoholic. If I have one drink, my life will spiral out of control. But man, if you can have a few drinks and not end up at a Denny's in Tijuana, God bless you, brother. It's your right!"

When the program "Glenn Beck" joined the revamped Headline News lineup in May, initially it looked as if CNN was simply peddling a younger, folksier version of Bill O'Reilly -- a self-appointed truth-squadding right-winger who will not shut up. But Beck, who was recently tapped to make editorial cameos on ABC's "Good Morning America," has brought something new to the TV blowhard genre.

While most sermonizing conservatives wait for a public debacle to expose their failings -- think of William Bennett and his slot-machine addiction or Rush Limbaugh and his pill problem -- Beck and his many inner demons are on a first-name basis, and he's constantly introducing them to viewers. His alcoholism is just part of it.

Plus, where O'Reilly traffics in absolute truths and certitudes, Beck is a hand-wringer, forever rummaging around the gray areas in any debate, pontificating even as he wonders aloud if his instincts are wrong. He's more culture worrier than culture warrior.

"The show is a little too high-and-mighty today," Beck tells his producer during a commercial break recently when the porn segment is over. "A little too 'Here's how to live your life.' "

With Beck's show, Headline News is hoping that viewers will watch a guy wrestle with himself, as well as with C-list pundits. "Glenn Beck" is watched by 336,000 viewers on a typical night, a fraction of the more than 2 million who tune in an hour later to "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel.

But Beck's numbers have doubled since his debut, Headline News says, and he remains a talk-radio force, with 232 stations airing his three-hour show every day.

Beck remains best known for what is surely his most embarrassing moment. It happened in mid-November, when Beck invited the country's first Muslim congressman, newly elected Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota, on the show and led off by lobbing this stink bomb:

"I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

Three groups have written to ABC urging the network to keep Beck off "Good Morning America," the Associated Press reported last month. "That blatant anti-Arab, anti-Muslim bias has been given credibility on a larger news show is something that concerns us," Arab American Institute spokeswoman Jennifer Kauffman told the AP.

When "The Daily Show" re aired the clip of Beck's question to Ellison, host Jon Stewart followed up with this: "Finally, a guy who says what people who aren't thinking are thinking."

Beck, 42, looks more athletic and less doughy in person. He is calmer and quieter than the guy he becomes on TV, but even in repose he has an astounding capacity to talk. A few years ago, a physician diagnosed him with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, he says, but during the workweek he doesn't take his medication.

Beck has the disarming habit of candidly discussing his foibles, not to mention the agonies and mistakes of his past and his lengthy bout of self-loathing and depression. He is not just a recovering alcoholic ("two glasses a day -- but tall glasses, and all Jack Daniel's ") and a former pothead ("every day for 15 years"). He is a recovering jerk.

"Honestly, I was just a despicable human being," he says. Raised in a town near Seattle, Beck skipped college and at 18 started bouncing around to different stations in ever-larger markets across the country, usually as a morning radio host.

As he rose to prominence, he was shadowed by the signal tragedy of his life: the suicide of his mother when he was 13. For that and other reasons that he is still sorting through, success did not make him happy; it made him insufferable.

He'll tell you the ugly stories. Like the time at a radio station in Baltimore when he fired a guy for bringing him the wrong pen to sign autographs. In 1991, Beck was unemployed and so notorious a prima donna that the only job he could get was in Hartford, where he hosted a morning show and managed three stations. It was a fraction of his past money and profile, provoking even greater acts of obnoxiousness and self-destruction.

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, eventually settling 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, what explains that 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.

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.