Note responses section at end of this post.
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in a clinic waiting room while one of my kids was having an eye appointment.
I happened to pick up the latest issue of Time magazine (Sep 17, 09), whose cover story  is the right-wing flamethrower (he and his large following would refer to himself quite differently) Glenn Beck of Fox News.
The three page article is very well worth reading, and reading carefully.  Here’s the link: #mce_temp_url#
For the few who’ve never heard of him, Beck is the hot commodity in the crowd which gathered in Washington DC on 9-12-09 to supposedly restore unity by sowing hatred and division against all things represented by President Obama (but without casting aspersions on people or policies of the previous administration which created or at minimum severely aggravated the problems the current administration now has to deal with).
In such a crowd, there is no need for consistency.  What’s right is right; what’s wrong is wrong.  Period.
Beck is a hot item, of that there is no doubt.  Within his constituency, he is very popular.  I seem to recall $23 million as his total anticipated revenue from his radio, television and publishing this year.
His weekly audience numbers in the several millions each day.  His market share might be 1 or 2% or so of the U.S. population.  He was compared, in the article, to others of similar ilk in our past history: Father Coughlin, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the “Know Nothings”, etc.  He is a gifted entertainer, able to emotionally move his audience.
In other words, he is a force to be reckoned with.
But there is another side to this story as well, part of it said in the article, part of it only implied.
In today’s incredibly fragmented media market, Beck has a relatively huge audience market share.  But it was pointed out in the article that a much greater viewership of comedian David Brenner in 1987 was judged to be so insignificant that his show was cancelled for lack of viewers.  In those pre-cable years, of course, there were few media outlets, and people couldn’t segregate themselves in “birds of a feather” ghettoes like we can today.
Beck simply looks to be larger than life, but in real terms Beck is not nearly as major a figure as he appears.
Even Beck’s large revenue stream belies the reality.  To quote the article, “extreme talk…like Beck, squeezes maximum profit from a relatively small, deeply invested audience.”  The $23 million doesn’t come from 23,000,000 givers of $1 each; a much smaller group pony up $50, $100 or maybe even more for his books, etc.
His audience, however, is a mass of people with different kinds of negative passions.  They are not a cohesive whole.  About all they share is what message makers have identified as a single common thread shared by many Americans: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”  Problem is, they’re “mad as hell” about assorted different things, and coordinating their outrage is a problem.  They’re just “mad as hell”.
Though relatively small, Beck’s is, however, a shrill and even dangerous audience.  They have learned from the likes of Beck that angry outbursts and generally outrageous behavior are effective.  Who enjoys being shouted at?
The dangerous part is that somewhere in the bowels of such a movement are the certifiably crazy people who will assassinate or blow up a building or in other ways create mayhem.
For this reason, and this reason alone, I think the Beck crowd needs to be taken very seriously, and confronted whenever and however people like ourselves have the opportunity.  We have much more power to moderate than we exercise.  We don’t need to be terrorized into silence.
I think we also have to look inwardly as well.  Like the Beck crowd, most advocates tend to associate only with like-minded people, and come to feel that there is only a single way of looking at a situation, and that the entire rest of the world is crazy.
Not so.
Do read the full article.  It’s now on the newstands or in your library.  Or the link is earlier in this post.