The awakening of Glenn Beck?
Have you wondered whatever happened to Glenn Beck?
I didn’t really follow him until I saw a recent article about his admission that since he left Fox News two and a half years ago, he’s had regrets about the way he’d been “divisive.” In other words, while he was making millions of dollars inflaming the passions of his fellow right wingers, he never stopped to notice that his careless rhetoric was “helping to tear the country apart.”
There’s a reason why I added quotation marks to the words “helping to tear the country apart.” Those were Beck’s own words.
He’d left Fox News after the sponsors of his daily monkeyshines began a mass exodus. They’d had enough of the man who, without any proof or reason, simply called President Obama a racist and said that he had “a deep seated hatred for white people.”
The Fox News/Glenn Beck divorce wasn’t pretty. Beck later claimed he left Fox News because he wanted to keep his “soul intact.” But a Fox News spokesperson countered with, “Glenn Beck wasn’t trying to save his soul. He was trying to save his ass. Advertisers fled his show, and even Glenn knows what that means in our industry.”
Beck, whose on-air antics had helped conjure the Tea Party movement out of thin air, still provided late-night comics with endless material. His daily tirades, full of nonsensical theories and outrageous predictions, were an easy target for mimicry.
So in late June of 2011, Beck bade farewell to Fox, and he launched his own TV network, a popular online blog (The Blaze), while he still maintained his daily radio show. He’s been free to say the outlandish things that had been his hallmark — until even Fox had had enough.
He now claims he’s had a change of heart. Two years after he left Fox News, in June of last year, he claimed that during his time at Fox, he wasn’t really aware that the seriousness of the times weren’t suited to enabling people to be “at each other’s throats.” He must’ve been too busy counting his money at the time.
Further proof that Beck may have grown something resembling a conscience came last week, when he returned to Fox News, and he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly.
“I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language,” he told Kelly (with a straight face).
Well, he can’t go back, and, if he could, I doubt if his language would be more “uniting” if his bank account depended on it.
He added, “I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart, and it’s not who we are.”
Oh yes it is. Beck might be a lot of things, but he’s no fool.
Right wing talk show hosts (namely Rush Limbaugh and folks like Beck) have known for decades that setting people with competing political philosophies against each other has become quite profitable — if not worthy of serious discourse.
No matter how much acrimony is brewed-up by these masters of the airwaves, their bottom line will always be THE bottom line.
If one of them advances the notion that “the long-term unemployed simply want to be pampered wards of the state,” it will percolate through the airwaves, and find a member of Congress who will eventually claim, as Rand Paul has, “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers.”
While Glenn Beck claims he’s had an awakening, I’m really skeptical.
“I didn’t realize how really fragile the people were. I thought we were kind of more in it together, and now I look back and realize, if we could’ve talked about the uniting principles instead of just the problems, I think I would look back more fondly,” he told Kelly.
Does he really believe people are that “fragile?”
This isn’t about people’s fragility. It’s about a TV crusader and political faith healer who serves nothing but his own pockets.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net