I am watching -- not without wincing and cringing and even from afar -- Glenn Beck's "sting" operation of the Baltimore chapter of ACORN, the community organizing group committed, allegedly, to democracy and social justice. Have you seen this bit of undercover work? Have you seen these video clips? [Update, 9.11.09: I now see that Mr. Beck was not the principal force behond this exposé. It seems a young journalist named Hannah Giles took the initiative.]
If these clips are trustworthy and authentic, then what does this mean for America? If they are staged and inauthentic, what do they mean for Glenn Beck?
But I ask: What explains Glenn Beck's meteoric rise? What explains his reach into the soul and psyche of countless conservative Americans, and what explains his reach into the psyches of finger-wagging, head-shaking, snickering leftists who abhor him?
And what does any of this portend for Mr. Beck and his family? And what does this portend for Fox News? Clearly, he has become a force to be reckoned with, no? Do I have this wrong? Was he not cited, for example, as the force which led to the resignation of Mr. Van Jones? Indeed, he was. If his larger theme is true -- that the Obama administration is a thugocracy rooted in bad-ass Chicago "politics" -- then what is he exposing himself to? Or is he just more of the same sort of theater: is he a man getting fabulously rich and famous exploiting fears, peddling conspiracy theories, and sounding the "red scare" alarm?
5 comments:
I've listened to probably a total of less than 30 minutes of Glenn Beck's show, but what I've heard was pretty much nothing more or less than good common sense.
Indeed, Milton, Mr. Beck is very much about common sense. But I am wondering how it is he has so readily and steadily climbed to the top of the heap; and why the mainstream media have permitted him to become a dominant source of news-making. He is pretty much responsible for the Van Jones resignation; he seems poised to force Congress to deal with ACORN.
Moreover, how is it the media are willing to ignore these stories, allowing FOX's ratings to go sky high?
BG
Well the quick and easy answer is that, for whatever reason, representatives of Big Media have drifted very far leftward from the "common sense" most Americans more or less hold dear, and when someone like Glenn Beck simply states the obvious from a Big Media perch, ordinary Americans find it wonderfully refreshing. That's probably an oversimplification, but not by much.
Dear Milton,
You are right, no doubt, but I wonder what this all really means for America. If Mr. Beck is setting the news agenda and the New York Times ignores that agenda, then is that not a tacit admission by the Times that it is simply a propaganda rag, full of deception? Does it not prove that it sees itself as the gatekeeper for a particular set of information? And does this suggest that a huge portion of America -- that portion that seems clueless about what's going on (even Charles Gibson said the other day that he did not know anything about the ACORN story) -- is blinded, perhaps even self-deluded?
I think this portends a sundering, a ripping apart of the country. This is not just a small rift; this is a cleft with mighty wedges in it, all being hammered on very, very hard.
Or something like that.
Peace,
BG
Yes, I think it is a tacit admission that so-called nation's newspaper of record is little more than a propaganda rag. The good news, I think, is that the American people are rapidly wising up to what's going on with the NYT, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, NBC, and other legacy media outlets. Somewhere recently I read results of a poll that put Americans' trust in the veracity of legacy media at somewhere around 29 percent. So, yes, I think that ever-shrinking portion of the population who swallow the legacy media's swill are to a great extent blinded and self-deluded. Despite what the media elites and their rapidly dwindling hangers-on may want to believe, Americans simply aren't buying it anymore (literally, as the more-than $1 per copy loss the NYT is now suffering illustrates).
I'm inclined to think the NYT's inaction in covering the Van Jones, ACORN, and other stories embarrassing to the Beltway-journalism complex portends the increasingly rapid marginalization of the legacy media in American life.
I see a sundering approaching, too, and that is the widespread abandonment by the American people of the so-called objective or mainstream media in favor of overtly partisan web sites such as Huffington Post and Daily Kos on the one hand and Pajamas Media and Hot Air on the other. Ironically enough, such a division away from the so-called mainstream media is a return of sorts to the nineteenth century, when newspapers made no pretense at objectivity. Although political debate could be and often was personal and rancorous in those days, I wonder if America was not at the same time more united in other, more significant ways.
Of course the analogy to the nineteenth century is not by any means exact. As I think you've pointed out, our day is suffering from a serious lack of civility and personal maturity. But I see encouraging signs: the rise of alternative media (including Contratimes and the hundreds of thousands of tea partiers refusing to go along with policies that threaten our country's economic and even existential future.
Let's pray that when the systems now collapsing have finished falling, they will be replaced by something more amenable to truth, liberty, virtue, and personal responsibility.
Post a Comment