Glenn Beck's Surge: Bad News for Greta?

Might Glenn Beck's overnight success at Fox News win him a place in prime time -- perhaps the one that currently belongs to Greta Van Susteren?

Late last summer, a plugged-in TV industry source told me that Beck was in the process of negotiating a deal that would take him from CNN's sister network, Headline News, over to Fox, where his conservative/libertarian politics would make him a natural fit. Though I couldn't confirm it at the time, that tip, of course, turned out to be dead on.

I bring this up because, in the same conversation, my source said that Beck was already being viewed as a possible replacement for Van Susteren, who represented the weakest link in Fox's otherwise indomitable lineup. Anderson Cooper's CNN show topped Van Susteren's On the Record in the key demographic of adults aged 25 to 54 last year (although Fox says that victory was the result of CNN playing cute with its schedule, essentially labeling what was really special election coverage as part of Cooper's regular broadcast).

Van Susteren has recently regained her lead over Cooper -- just in time to get smashed by Beck, whose show, despite airing in the ghetto that is 5 p.m., is already the network's third-highest-rated program. Meanwhile, Van Susteren's overly close relationship to Sarah Palin -- John Coates Coale, Van Susteren's husband, has been advising the Alaska governor on political matters -- has raised embarrassing questions.

When I ran the Beck-replaces-Van Susteren scenario by sources at Fox, I was told unequivocally that it won't happen, in part because the network has always had a woman in its prime time lineup and Fox News chief Roger Ailes would be reluctant to change that. Maybe. On the other hand, Ailes has never concerned himself much with political correctness in other contexts, and was happy enough to do away with a different sort of balance when he opted to let the network's only prominent liberal, Alan Colmes, depart without a replacement.