Glenn Beck is Mad as Hell

Let's hope Fox News is not gonna take it anymore.

In the past I have avoided writing about Glenn Beck here. I've made a case that his views don't matter and I'm afraid I'll undercut it if I bring him up. Nevertheless, recent events have gotten me thinking about him. At the recommendation of a couple close friends, Erin and I watched the 1976 film Network a few weeks ago, and I was struck by the similarities between Glenn Beck and Howard Beale, the film's central character. In the wake of the revolution in Egypt, the likeness has intensified.

Network is the story of veteran nightly news anchor Howard Beale, who is told he will be let go because of his declining rankings. As a result he begins a series of on-air meltdowns, which include this infamous diatribe:



The speech strikes a nerve, and Beale's failing ratings skyrocket. Consequently, his producers decide to keep him on the air and cash in on his worsening insanity.

The parallels between Beck and Beale are abundant, and they have been written about before. Both men are on TV during a terrible recession, and both men are able to harness the public's burning fear and anger because of it. Both men have a penchant for apocalyptic conspiracy theories. Both men blur the lines between journalism and entertainment. Both men believe the world is descending into godless turmoil.

Beck has been this way for at least as long has he has been on Fox News. He has called the President a racist. He has accused everyone and their mother of being a Nazi. He has likened social justice to communism and fascism. But recently he has turned it up a notch, even for Beck. He has decided that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia will pave the way for leftists, radicals, Islamists, and socialists to band together and take over first the Middle East... and then the world. It's even crazier than it sounds:



Let me repeat some on-air quotes from Beck here.

"The coming insurrection is here."

"We are witnessing the birth of the new world order."

"You want to call me crazy? Go to hell. Call me crazy all you want."

But as paranoid and fanatical as this rhetoric is, Beck is not all Beale, primarily because Beck is sane. As half-baked and egotisitcal as his ranting is (the introduction to his show likens him to MLK and Ghandi), it's not basis for believing the man is nuts. Network makes it clear that Beale has lost his mind in a bizarre scene when he appears to hear a disembodied voice give him a message to recite on his program. I doubt Beck is hearing any voices but his own and the choice few he has decided to listen to. This lends terrific irony to the fact that Beck has on at least three occasions (here's one) welcomed comparisons to Beale. It seems lost on him that likening yourself to a madman isn't a great move if you want to sound credible while spewing fear and rage.

Another difference between Beck and Beale is that even though Beale was crazy, he made a few points that were far more truthful than anything I've ever heard from Beck. In this classic monologue, Beale lambastes his audience for imitating television, which he explains is only a cheap imitation of them, carefully designed to tell them anything they want to hear ("In God's name, you people are the real thing; we are the illusion!"). The speech even warns against the condition of media today, in which five major companies own the vast majority of media outlets. In effect, Beale warned us about Beck.

Perhaps the most important difference between Beck and Beale however is popularity. In Network, Beale becomes the most popular newsman in America, reaching 62 million viewers each night. Beck is a drop in the bucket in comparison; he has never had more than 3 million. But this gives way to another Beck/Beale similarity: as Beck's batty rhetoric has come to be expected, his ratings have taken a big hit, dropping around 40% in January. I have to believe this is making the Fox brass pretty nervous, especially since so many companies have refused to advertise on his show, not wanting to tarnish their reputations. I imagine at this point Fox is just hoping viewers will hang around to see ads on other segments.

This downturn is coupled with the fact that mainline Conservatives are finally starting to confess their discomfort with Beck's divisive wackiness. Bill Kristol did as much in his Weekly Standard column last week:

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s. 

Quite a few fellow Conservatives agreed with Kristol. Even Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly seemed uncomfortable and dismissive of Beck's views when he had Glenn on his program last week, which is not too surprising, considering Fox has had somewhat of an awkward relationship with Beck since his program began. I can't help but wonder (ok hope) that a cocktail of dwindling advertisers, bad ratings, and popular disapproval will finally cause Fox to pull his plug.

Which is good, but it's not great. Beck leaving the air would mean one less voice adding to the noise, but it would only be one. Beck is a symptom, not the problem. What Beck represents is a media which has found a way to make money from something essential but not lucrative: an objective free press. It has done this by changing objective news into something that is neither objective nor news, a fantastical creation of us vs. them bullsh*t which creates nightly straw men for us to fear or hate. Just like Beale warned us, there is money to be made in telling us what we want to hear: that we are right, that those who disagree with us are pitiful and slimy and stupid.

No one who I have read has made this point more arrestingly than Ted Koppel, in an incredible but disheartening Washington Post oped last November:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

[...] Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their labels insist.

Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor.

[...] The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they say, is cheap.

Sources for this post not yet linked: NYT | Fair.org
Special thanks to the great Drew Norris