Glenn Beck is Bad News even for Right-leaning FOX News

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1 September 2009 :: Denver Lessing

Why is Glenn Beck, the pseudo-emotional apocalyptic faux-evangelical conservative big mouth, bad news even for FOX News and its nakedly ideological content skew? In short, because even the most biased and uninformed viewers feel stupid listening to his lies. His antics are insulting to those he attacks, but also to those he seeks to woo, and his work is directly harming the conservative cause.

FOX News has carved out a niche for itself among specific groups, some of which overlap, but which are characterized by one or more of the following tendencies: a tendency to vote Republican, perhaps without knowing what policy issue motivates this vote; a desire to cry out loudly “I am conservative” or “I am patriotic”; a tendency to fear the foreign or to worry that poor people are plotting a communist takeover; an unwillingness to admit that they are themselves poor; a secret or latent racism; a passion for character assassination as a political tool; blind faith in the idea that conservatives are virtuous and liberals are morally lax.

Glenn Beck likes to think he can take advantage of all the intellectual weaknesses he presumes to be characteristic of his audience, and so he fabricates lies in his head, or on paper, or in connection with venomous political action groups, and he spells out those vicious lies, in order to create a climate of fear in which his audience is supposed to feel safe.

But his lies are so bald-faced and stupid, it is hard to imagine anyone not being insulted by his maniacal rants. He recently accused Pres. Obama, whose much beloved mother and grandparents were white, of hating all white people. Beck is a hate-monger openly seeking to turn his viewers against their own country by sowing terror among them.

Any rational person can see through these claims. Even the most libera-reviling arch-conservative is aware enough of the world of fact to understand that political views do not make evil, evil actions do. They can understand that Barack Obama’s African ancestry does not make him hate America any more than Pres. Bush’s English ancestry would lead him to hate the nation that rebelled against his ancestors’ monarch.

They can understand that self-interested television personalities like Glenn Beck have no reason to be responsible with information if they can profit from their viewers’ ignorance, and they understand that their own conservatism is not decided or aggrandized by watching one television network over another. Those facts are made far more obvious by Mr. Beck’s inane and morally disgusting use of false logic to sow hate.

Somewhere, in the gut of any rational or decent human being, there’s an automatic reflex that alerts the mind to the onset of an imposed rash of hate or aggression. People who watch FOX News because they find it “entertaining” or because they want to hear that conservative views are infinitely virtuous, also have this feeling when their ears inform their gut that they are being nudged down a road of violent unthinking revulsion and hate.

Glenn Beck does not offer any substantive critique, any policy choices, any useful background information, or any independently verifiable statistical claims, to make his screeds worth a viewer’s time or spiritual equilibrium. He is spending “political capital” as if it were an infinite resource, when he has always been one of the weakest links on cable television, and is now descending into something like unabashed sociopathy.

FOX News does not make much of an effort, as a network —though some of its anchors do— to appear to be a news-oriented fact-gathering machine. The network is fairly confident in its strident and unrelenting full-court-press extreme conservatism. Some of its leading voices are so far out of the mainstream, their views are unrecognizable even in the increasingly conservative terms of the Republican party’s platform.

But, Beck’s radicalism is unhinged, haphazard, violent and even full of hateful assertions and lies. His is not just an all-spin zone; it’s a terrain where the human intellect is set aside in exchange for a false thought process which takes great comfort in the idea that reacting with anger, desperation, resentment and vitriol somehow always justifies even the wildest remarks.

As more and more sponsors now refuse to back his show, and criticism of his hysterics and distortions spreads even to the conservative media establishment, Beck has now begun to be ridiculed for unthought antics, like spelling oligarch as “oligarh”, saying there’s a letter missing, then adding a “y” to the end, in order to make a false claim about liberal politics that is literally irrelevant to the meaning of the word oligarch.

FOX News’ permissive attitude toward the bizarre and the ridiculous as proffered by Mr. Beck is indicative of a news culture that is unserious and holds overtly insulting views of its own audience. Beck’s antics have offended mainstream conservatives in increasing numbers for this very reason, because he makes a mockery of their causes and allows opponents to paint them in broad strokes with labels like “bigot”, “biased”, “hate-monger”, and “fringe”, a rhetorical problem no one who is serious about conservative values wants to have.