Time usually does a decent job at staying politically neutral and unbiased in its cover stories, but it definitely leans left from time to time. David Von Drehle actually didn’t add a ton of judgment on Beck though, but the quotations he chose to bold and highlight makes it pretty clear what he thinks about Beck.
But holy crap… Beck is a lot more nuts than I realized. And the article added some interesting factoids that I didn’t know about, specifically his mother’s suicide when he was a teenager. The article describes Beck as “tireless, funny, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD.” The article, comically, also quotes Steven King’s description of Beck as “Satan’s mentally challenged younger brother,” which made me pee myself a little. Apparently, his struggles with addiction and deep depression led him down his own dark path in which he too contemplated suicide. Some quick google searches about Beck’s mother yields conspirator theories about the inconsistencies in Beck’s story about his mother’s “suicide,” which further complicate Beck’s nutjobiness (it’s a word… look it up). Regardless, this guy has a really dark past, is visibly mentally unstable, and yet is one of the most influential media figures in the country. What the hell America?
Beck’s sound bites needn’t any political spin; he’s all over the place. My favorite snippet of the article is “I don’t trust a single weasel in Washington. I don’t care what party they’re from. But unless we trust each other, we’re not going to make it.” Beck actively tells every one of his 2.5 million viewers every day that no one can be trusted in Washington, that “Barack Obama has a deep-seeded hatred for white people,” and that “[everyone] should be afraid.” How can you say you want everyone to trust each other but spit that garbage out of 24-hour news networks? Not helping…
In actuality, though, this article doesn’t really do much in denouncing Beck; it’s more interested in highlighting the business of Beck and other high profile political media critics like Michael Moore and Al Franken. Beck is estimated to rake in a ballpark number of 23 million a year. As Von Drehle states, “we all can agree that, no matter where it comes from, rubbing the sore has become a lucrative business. The mutual contempt of the American extremes can fatten wallets at bookstores, cable-news departments, AM radio stations and documentary film fests.” And that’s maybe the most disappointing thing I took from this article. It might not even be about politics, opinions, or patriotism; it might just be about cash. It’s kind of ironic, actually. All of these guys were at the forefront of the media mob when AIG and Bear Stearns went down, raging about greed on Wall Street (which I’m not refuting… those were highly unethical). But isn’t it just as unethical to cash in on the “American extremes,” to pump all of this nonsense from a major news network, promoting things like the Tea Party a few weeks back? In some sense, it might be even more unethical. It’s one thing to pillage someone’s wallet like Madoff, but right (and left) extremists like Beck are cashing in people’s beliefs, and there’s something extremely unsettling about it.
The worst part about it, as Von Drehle writes, is that “the more the host is criticized, the more committed the original audience becomes” (hence the Glenn Beck for president signs). So I guess I’m not helping.
Anyways, the article is a good one, and Von Drehle is a really good writer. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading accounting and stats textbooks for the past 6 weeks, but he had some great lines. I especially liked “trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books.”
Give it a read… http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1924348,00.html
And if you didn’t see the Tea Party videos, check this one out. You see just how manipulated some extremists are. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y
