Method to His Madness
After being involved in Glenn Beck research and discussion for many weeks, it seems the most common defense of Beck by his supporters is that Glenn is equivalent to Jon Stewart. Which is like saying that Ric Romero is comparable to Ron Burgundy.
To draw an equivalence between these two may seem ridiculous. I feel it is simplistic to even mention them together, although it is like many of Beck’s arguments, you end up defending the obvious and rebutting the absurd.
Ron Burgundy was a character in a movie, that skewered news presenters as being vain, pretentious, pathetic, and ultimately unnoticed and ineffectual.
Ric Romero is a news presenter that seems to take himself seriously and meanwhile has become an internet meme meaning 'obviously we TV news people are the last to know anything'.
Glenn Beck defends his style of broadcasting by saying he is not a journalist, he is just a commentator, or an editorialist.
If his show had disclaimers before and after it would not be taken as fact, and may not have such a distorting affect on the public discourse. Of course it does not have disclaimers, and so it warps peoples beliefs and conversations.
There are many examples of Beck’s lies, hyperbole, and lying to achieve Machiavellian political gains.
One that I found interesting and different than most is a show in which he tried to exploit peoples fear of the government by claiming that if a customer logged on to the cars.com website, they would give the Orwellian government endless and unlimited access to their computer and documents for life. It was an absurd and ridiculous statement, that was quickly proven wrong by factcheck.org.
In the segment there was a computer logged on to the website that was connected to the section of the cars.com site only accessible to car dealers, which means that the FOX crew bypassed security regulations to connect to it, and they claimed it was accessible to the general public, which it was not. The claim was checked by writers, producers and lawyers on the show before broadcast, and required black hat hackers and a willingness to break the law to demonstrate.
This shows not just a careless editorial process, nor an extremist political viewpoint, rather it is a willfulness and intent to mislead and misrepresent. Glenn Beck and FOX news have been definitely and demonstrably shown to be supporting a far right wing and republican party viewpoint and attempting to manipulate public opinion away from organizations that serve the public interest through outright deception and manipulation of the facts.
To claim that Beck is reporting facts from a certain perspective or little known ideas, is only possible if you ignore reality and believe his claims about not belonging to a political party. Beck’s agenda is written in boldface type across all his shows, and underneath his wild and bizarre speculations.
Beck is not performing comedy, he is not a surrealist, nor is he an artist. He presents his show as being factual and they are proven over and over again to be biased and untrue.
Glenn is a dis-honest, fear-mongering, self-serving, bigoted, treacherous, treasonous pretender dishing out propaganda and intentionally misleading hokum night after night. His lawyers are illuminated to his ways and means and coach him on the language to use to stay out of jail if he drives someone to a mad, violent act, while his audience is left in the dark.
“You pinhead. You think we would actually be sitting here and saying “well, look at the way she was dressed?” If she were Joan McCain, stop it. You self-centered self-righteous socialist out of control dangerous man-hating bitch. Shut your mouth. We might have bought into this crap in the 1960s because too many people were doing LSD. We’re not on LSD anymore — we need to start making sense.”
- The Glenn Beck Program, March 3, 2008
- In response to feminist Gloria Steinem’s opinions on the John McCain/”Joan” McCain
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