Glenn Beck Inspires Gun Nut To Stakeout NY Military Facility.

The New York Post is one of the country's worst newspapers, and its editorial content essentially makes it the print edition of FOX News. It's a glaring example of News Corp's vertical integration at work.

Rupert's rag ran an account of a New York gun nut yesterday, though. But it's the rest of the story that's most compelling.

First, the basics:

A Long Island mother of three -- armed to the teeth with an assault rifle and shotgun -- was arrested for scouting out and taking pictures of an Air National Guard base in the Hamptons, authorities said.

Suffolk County Undersheriff Joseph Caracappa said Nancy Genovese, 53, of Quogue, was arrested for trespassing outside the Gabreskie Airport ANG facility Thursday night, and Homeland Security and the FBI are also investigating.

Caracappa said Genovese was taking photographs of the perimeter of the base. A search of her car uncovered an arsenal -- an XM-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and 500 rounds of ammunition.

When asked what she was doing, she replied, "Nothing."

"They are registered weapons, but they're scary weapons," said Caracappa. "It's very odd."

He said she had been at the base a few weeks earlier, taking photos and asking questions of the guards.

Genovese, an unemployed single mom with no prior arrest record, was charged with trespassing.

She was arraigned yesterday afternoon at Southampton Town Justice Court, where a judge set bail at $50,000, and then ordered Genovese held for a psychiatric examination after she went berserk in the courtroom.

"She was hysterical -- screaming and flailing around," said Caracappa.

There's much more to this than a stray gun nut stalking a military base, however. Daily Kos diarist booksnmore4you reports that Genovese is also a Glenn Beck nut (h/t to Mediaite):

The woman, Nancy Genovese, had been seen at the base a few weeks earlier, taking photos and questioning the guards. This time she had returned to take photos of the perimeter of the base. It's not difficult to make the connection that she was paranoid about "FEMA Camps".

Genovese is a Glenn Beck fan, according to her MySpace page (archived here). "He is mad as hell and so are we. He is right and so are we", writes Genovese, who also posted a video of a Glenn Beck rant.

Genovese additionally posted an amateur video indicating her apparent affinity for right-wing militia movements.

And of course she's a tea bagger, as her Twitter page makes clear.

This from the Westhampton News:

This wasn’t the first time Ms. Genovese was observed taking pictures of the base, according to the sheriff’s department. When Deputy Sheriff Robert Carlock arrived at the scene Thursday night, he was told by members of the Air National Guard that she had been warned for several weeks to stay off of the airport property. She had reportedly been seen several times taking pictures along the perimeter of the base. An off-duty Southampton Town Police officer recognized Ms. Genovese when she returned to the base Thursday night.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security were notified by the sheriff’s department. Spokesmen for both agencies have announced that they will launch their own investigations.

Will Glenn Beck or FOX News acknowledge their dual roles in inciting the fairly imbalanced? Did Bill O'Reilly or his network do so when Dr. George Tiller was gunned down after years of O'Reilly referring to him as "Tiller the baby killer?"

The FOX News daily diet of paranoia, socialism scares and race-baiting is boffo box office, as reflected by their cable ratings. But pandering to the dark side of their perpetually aggrieved and chronically conspiratorial fringe audience is a dangerous game, and as Glenn Beck and his network continue to play with fire, they are edging ever closer to igniting a raging, out-of-control inferno.

The Times They Are A-Changin'.

From DailyFinance.com:

What's the No. 1 brand in cable news? That depends, in part, on how many screens you're counting.
With the second-quarter drawing to a close, Fox News Channel is running up the score on the competition, posting its highest ratings ever and boasting of an evening audience equal to those of CNN, MSNBC and Headline News combined.

But that's only looking at TV. And that's something CNN -- which had its best second quarter since 2003 in total viewers, but fell to third place in primetime in the crucial 25-to-54 demographic -- says it's not doing anymore now that so much news is being consumed on computers and mobile devices.

"We used to be a television business," says Jack Wakshlag, head of research for Turner Broadcasting. "We see our future in terms of being a multi-platform media company. Now we need a metric that will measure our power or our presence across the different platforms."

As it happens, Nielsen, the ratings firm, recently started tracking such a metric. It's called Nielsen Fusion, and it combines viewership and online usage data. The Fusion rankings for April show CNN with a commanding lead over both MSNBC and Fox News when it comes to reach among all viewers. (That's looking at the full day, not just primetime.) CNN (which is part of the same media conglomerate as Daily Finance parent AOL) reached 125.3 million people in April, versus 105.5 milllion for MSNBC and 104.3 million for Fox.

That's not really a surprise. CNN has always beaten Fox and MSNBC in reach, or cumulative audience. (Fox and MSNBC counter that advertisers make their buys based on ratings, not cumulative reach, which doesn't reflect duration of viewership.) And CNN and MSNBC both have a big head start on Fox when it comes to web traffic; the Fox News Digital Network attracts fewer than half the unique visitors of the MSNBC or CNN digital networks (No. 1 and 3 among all news sites, respectively).

But as viewers increasingly migrate their news consumption from televisions to other types of screens, total cross-platform viewership is only going to get more important, says Wakshlag. He notes that 20 million viewers get news from both CNN television and a CNN website in the same month, versus only 9 million who do the same with Fox. "For some reason, they don't have a lot of what we're calling 'integrators,' and we're seeing that as something that really says something about the strength of the brand," he says.

Fox, of course, views CNN's emphasis on a newfangled measurement as a mark of its failure to secure the old-fashioned ratings advertisers care about. "Apparently the sheer embarrassment of getting beat by both Headline News and MSNBC along with the continued implosion of Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper has led CNN to its latest act of desperation," says a Fox News spokesman. "We wish Jack well in continuing to defend their battle for fourth place."

In an unscientific survey conducted by JackRabbit Café, FOX News is unrivaled in boorish, asshole-ish hosts and rampant paranoia, MSNBC leads in cross-promotion with a sister company (NBC) and--in Larry King--CNN employs the world's only living fossil.