Edited by Laura Berlinsky-Schine
Republicans are too well-behaved for them. They call the president an extremist. America’s ultra-right has found a home at the Fox Broadcasting Company.
At first glance, Glenn Beck looks like your average, friendly American. He has a preppy butch haircut; he’s neatly dressed and always has a nice smile on his choirboy face. You’d give him your house keys so he could water your plants while you’re away. When the 45-year-old TV host is on the air, however, he morphs into a raving fanatic.
He raged that Taliban leader Mullah Mir Mohammed, captured in Afghanistan last week, deserved to be shot dead on the spot. The blizzard in Washington, he fumed, was proof that the notion of global warming was an anti-American liberal fabrication. During a video clip of Obama defending his recovery program, Beck began howling at the camera like a hound. Beck always comes to the same conclusion at the end of every show: Obama and his followers want to destroy America and turn it into a Stalinist or fascist dictatorship. The choice is yours, but the point is, they want a dictatorship.
None of this would be worth considering if Beck were a marginal figure in the U.S. media landscape. Beck is the most successful TV host in the country. His viewing audience figures last year were miles ahead of any competition in the early evening time slot. His audience has tripled since he first went on the air in early 2008, while that of his competition has either remained constant or decreased.
His ratings reflect the disturbing power of the Tea Party movement in the USA, those insecure Christian conservatives who have sought refuge in what The New York Times columnist Frank Rich called paranoid populism. Beck is the face and the voice of a movement that is a loose collection of ultra-conservative Americans for whom traditional Republicans are too complacent and who see Obama as an extremist who wants to destroy America completely. Sarah Palin may have been keynote speaker at the Tea Party’s national convention in Memphis earlier this month, but a large majority of convention delegates said they would prefer to have Glenn Beck as their political leader.
Cable news broadcaster Fox has made good use of the Tea Party phenomenon. Beck’s show is the leadoff to a daily anti-Obama insult marathon. Follow-up hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity keep the rabble-rousing going continuously until ten o’clock. Above and beyond that, Fox has signed two likely conservative presidential candidates to host weekly programs: Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. Fox has long since given up any pretext of being fair and balanced.
Impartiality doesn’t sell on U.S. television. Cable news organization CNN tried to position itself as the last bastion of impartial journalism only to see its audience desert it in droves. MSNBC, with talk show hosts Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann as a liberal counterbalance, seems to be the only organization capable of even halfway challenging Fox.
The traditional networks ABC, CBS and NBC continue to command the largest news audiences. In contrast to the cable news networks, however, they only broadcast a single half-hour news show each evening. Public debate, therefore, is determined by CNN, MSNBC and, above all, Fox, which broadcasts nothing but political shows the entire evening. As Matt Bai wrote in The New York Times, “They set the agenda for what will be discussed tomorrow in Washington.”
Barack Obama is finding that operating in this media setting isn’t easy. Last year, the Obama administration accused Fox of relinquishing any pretense of being a news organization and declared it a political opponent. Obama continues to make himself available to Fox for interviews nonetheless. This week, Michelle Obama appeared on Fox advocating for the treatment of overweight children. The Obamas can’t get past the television networks. The president’s political goal of trying to establish at least some rapprochement between factions so the government can accomplish its goals can’t be achieved without the help of television. Apparently neither can it be achieved with it.
I have to disagree about Fox News being right wing and anti obama. In fact they always have both sides represented in any debates.
Glenn Beck has an opinion show and he states facts that other news stations such as msnbc would never tackle, they are left wing all the way.
I alway check his facts and find them to be correct. Sometimes I wish he wasn’t right because I worry about this country and the rest of the world also.
Let’s take a poll and see how many people agree that Fox is unbiased and fair. Unfortunately, Fox News does not confine itself to the facts, but nourishes the right-wing appetite for sensationalism and distortion of the issues. This trend is dividing our country and paralyzing our government more than any other factor. The article states that MSNBC is the only organization halfway challenging the intensity with which Fox presents its views, and I’ve never seen Olbermann or Maddow work themselves into such a fever pitch of hysterical ranting that Beck and his ilk do.
We need to enforce a standard on free speech that exludes intentional distortion of facts, and have a sane and rational discussion about how to solve the monumental challenges this country faces, most of which were allowed to swell uncontrollably and unabated during the Bush years. The right wing marched lock-step with Bush for eight years; no one was challenging Bush when we got into unwinnable wars and our national debt was doubling, and now it’s all Obama’s fault? The facts support a different conclusion.
The problem with the Republican party is that they are Republicans first and Americans second; they would rather see the country fail and be unable to resolve the truly frightening issues we face than to allow Obama to have a successful presidency. Many Republican leaders of Congress have stated this explicitly.
Let’s have a discussion based on objective and verifiable fact, and deny Fox the privilege of using the air waves to vent untruths and incite further divisions; united we stand, divided we fall. Which side will you be on?