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

Sandra McCracken – "Lose You"

This is one of those songs I never expected to play a million times.

Sandra McCracken – "Lose You"


Image: Geof F. Morris

Let Freedom Ring

To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson

So let freedom ring from Aswan to Cairo, from Luxor to Alexandria. Let the country where God rescued his people from slavery, where a young couple and their miraculous baby sought shelter from authoritarian cruelty, experience a new birth of freedom.

It is true that in the coming months the U.S. may lose a powerful ally in the Middle East. It is true that the Egyptian people may choose a leader who will hinder our fight against organized terror and slow our efforts for a lasting peace in the Middle East region.

But if this happens it will be the Egyptian people who have chosen it, and this choice is what we as a country, as a people, have staked the convictions of our hearts and the blood of our fathers upon. Together, as one people, we have "sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It is written on the arms of our laborers and the tongues of our leaders, on the minds of our children and a thousand white stones in Arlington.

So let tyrants everywhere cower in their beds. Let there be no rest in the palaces of Iran, in Zimbabwe, in Sudan, in North Korea, in Saudi Arabia. The liberation of one man or woman liberates all men and women; the liberation of one people liberates all people. Let freedom ring.

Celebrations outside the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, DC after the announcement 

of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's resignation in Cairo February 11, 2011

Image: Messay Shoakena

Our Man Reagan

Ronald Reagan has been in the news a lot lately. His 100th birthday would have been Sunday, and everyone has been celebrating in their own way. Sarah Palin delivered a 2012 stump speech at his birthday celebration dinner, steering clear of Reagan's hope and optimism by declaring the U.S. on a "road to ruin" with herself, a bona fide Reagan reincarnate, our only chance for survival.

Meanwhile, NPR devoted the weekend to its signature "Reagan wasn't so great" coverage, which went something like, "Everyone talks about how 'great' Reagan was. Reagan wasn't so great. He never got his picture on bubblegum cards, did he? How can you say someone is great who's never had his picture on bubblegum cards?"

In print, many publications took the myth-busting angle, explaining how today's Reagan ethos contradicts much of what the man actually believed and did. These are the stories that interest me, because the more I learn about Reagan, the more I admire the man he actually was over the icon modern Conservatives have created. I think many of these "myth-busting" articles are attempts to tear down Republican Reagan hero worship, and I understand that—but for someone with my political sensibilities, it just makes the guy more likeable.

For instance, many in the GOP oppose a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Reagan supported a bill that would have provided one. Many believe that no true Republican can support raising taxes as a means to achieve fiscal responsibility. Reagan raised taxes six of the eight years he was in office, and presided over the largest peace-time tax increase in U.S. history. Many in the GOP believe we should never negotiate with countries which do not meet our terms, but it's unquestionable that Reagan's expert political maneuvering in his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev helped end the Cold War. Many in the GOP support the use of torture as a last resort, Reagan flatly rejected it. Many of the GOP faithful want to cut every social program the government has to offer, while Reagan worked hard to reform Social Security, enabling it to continue. Many GOP members promote absolute dedication to the party line and advocate a purity pledge, while Reagan himself spent many years as a liberal Democrat and had close relationships with Democrats during his presidency.

Of course I don't think every day of Reagan's presidency was the 4th of July. He ran massive, unprecedented deficits, he was involved at some level in the Iran-Contra scandal, he promoted "Star Wars," he sparked a decades-long demonization of Liberalism which has not been helpful to our country, to name a few. I think I'm more of a Nixon-era Republican than a Reagan-era one. But what I admire is that Reagan was more of a complex pragmatist than hardly anyone on either side of the aisle is willing to admit. He was no Sarah Palin, or Rand Paul, or Jim DeMint.

Which brings me to this quote I heard Sunday, nestled in a signature NPR "Reagan was just okay" piece. It's from Eugene Jarecki, director of the HBO documentary, "Reagan."

I'd like us to find a way to stop putting all of the hope or blame in our leaders. I think Reagan is overly lionized just as much as I would say he would be overly vilified if it were turned the other way.

The same is true of Barack Obama. I think the public has to ask of our leaders that which we want the country to be. And I think what happens instead is that we leave it to the leader, and we take ourselves out of the equation by saying, they're either all of our hopes, or they're all that's wrong.

Ronald Reagan wasn't that. Barack Obama won't be that. And it actually won't change until we ourselves demand a different way of being the country we sort of were taught to expect as children.

Accepting personal responsibility rather than handing it to government? I think the Gipper would agree.

Sources for this post:
WaPo 1 | WaPo 2 | NPR

Quotes: Justice, Oppression, and the Poet

"Justice delayed is justice denied." William Gladstone via Del Glick

"The oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity, become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well." Paulo Freire via Rachel Trego

"My God is a poet." Anna Scott

Stop the Presses

Last year I wrote a blog post about my belief that the solution to the declining revenue of print journalism is something like iTunes: a one-stop web app that would unify all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place and make paying for news easier than getting it for free.

Recently I came across a lengthy article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books which had similar ideas, and expressed many of the same thoughts I've been having about the future of news. Here are a few of them:

1. Print journalism was in decline before the internet came along, but digital media has accelerated it. Online advertising has not proved as lucrative as print advertising, and the internet takeover of classifieds hurt newspapers badly.

2. At the same time, online readership is up. Last year in the US, online news became more popular than newspapers.

3. Some newspapers and magazines, like the Economist, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, have been able to make money using paywalls. Others, like the New York Times and the Times, have not.

4. A typical newspaper spends over half its budget on printing and pushing paper. Content, marketing, administration, advertising... it's all small potatoes compared with getting dead trees to peoples' doorsteps. If the NYT kept its website but stopped selling physical paper today, it could afford to give each of its subscribers four free Kindles a year. As Lanchester says, "at some point, the economic logic of this is going to become irresistible."

5. If newspapers move exclusively from print to digital, the final solution is a unified, online subscription and reader service. Here's Lanchester:

The solution to the industry’s woes is simple – not easy, but simple. When the cassette recorder was invented, the music industry announced a moral panic over the fact that people could simply steal music from the radio, or copy it from each other. Some people did, too, but not nearly as many as the people who simply bought the stuff. That’s because tapes were relatively cheap, and it was more of a shag to steal, copy or bootleg them than it was to buy them. It was the same with videos. The entertainment business needs to make it easier, and more convenient, to pay for this stuff than it is to steal it.

The thing which did that, when it came along, was iTunes, which has reshaped both the music business and the digital landscape more generally.

I feel equally certain in saying that what the print media need, more than anything else, is a new payment mechanism for online reading, which lets you read anything you like, wherever it is published, and then charges you on an aggregated basis, either monthly or yearly or whatever. For many people, this would be integrated into an RSS feed, to create what amounts to an individualised newspaper. I would be entirely happy to pay to subscribe to Anthony Lane on movies in the New Yorker, and Patricia Wells on restaurants in the Herald Tribune, and Larry Elliott on economics in the Guardian, and David Pogue on technology in the New York Times, and I also want to feel free to read anything else which catches my eye, whenever I feel like it – I just don’t want to have to think about paying every time I click on the article to read it. I want a monthly or yearly charge, taken off my credit card without my having to think about it. That charge could mount up pretty high over the course of a year, but not as high as the current costs – $4.99 for a single digital issue of the New Yorker, for example. Papers can charge different amounts for their content, and we the readers will be the market who decides what is worth what. The charging process has to be both invisible and transparent: invisible at the moment of use, and transparent when I want to see what I’ve paid. The idea is for a cross between a print version of Spotify, with a dash of Amazon and a dash of iTunes. All those players have the expertise to do it, as do the credit card companies. From the technical perspective it should not be all that hard to do, and it would, I believe, work in remonetising the newspaper business. Let us pay – we’re happy to pay. [...]

Make the process as easy as possible. Make it invisible and transparent. Make us register once and once only. Walls are not the way forward, but walls are not the same thing as payment, and without some form of payment, the press will not be here in five years’ time. I hope one of the big organisations is working on this idea or something like it, because for print newspapers, the clock isn’t just ticking, it’s ticking louder and faster.

This simply has to be the future of news.

I know many dedicated news junkies out there will be disappointed to lose the experience of holding a paper in their hands, feeling the newsprint between their fingers as they sip their coffee. There's always the possibility of a luxury print-edition option as Lanchester suggests, but I think ultimately, the question has already been decided for us. Most news readers prefer digital, and they're no longer willing to pay for paper. Barring some miraculous turn-around, we are now faced with a choice: print journalism—choose one. I see no workable solution to the news crisis that includes print, and a bright future for journalism without it. Gutenberg will soon be replaced by Babbage and Berners-Lee, and when this happens we will be one forward-thinking tech company away from journalism's complete rebirth.

Update 2/3/11: My buddy Scott just informed me that what was rumor in Lanchester's article is now reality: Rupert Murdoch has teamed up with Apple and released the Daily, a digital-only newspaper. It's only available on the iPad and therefore doesn't really match the future I described in this post, but it's a start.