COMPARE: Howard Beale vs. Glenn Beck

I agree with the previous 3 posts.

Howard Beale is educated, erudite, can speak English...
Glenn Beck was a top-40 DJ in Middle- America before his utterly mistaken and racist take on 911 convinced him he had a message to share quite similar in tone to the deviant Murdock's and Faux News picked up on it...

One is authentic, pure, alarming social commentary from a broken man who became too far gone to prevent himself from being exploited and subsumed into manufactured specatcle.

The other is smug, savvy calculation by an opportunist with a talent for yapping people into agreement who seized the right moment to manufacture his own spectacle.

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

VS

"Well, I'm as mad as heck, and I'm not going to take this anymore! Today's program is brought to you by Coca Cola! Have a Coke and a smile, America, while you read my new heart-warming book 'The Christmas Sweater,' on sale at fine booksellers near you! If you don't, gay Islamic terrorists will take your guns and your freedom something something Obamacare!"

-------------------------

I have meddled with the primal forces of nature and I will atone.

Well, here I am, again! Three-and-a-half years... How time flies!

I just took a tour through these threads--and *thanks so much* to (almost) all comers!--and have been tearing thru Dave Itzkoff's "Mad as Hell"... and had another flash on the theme, comparing the (now, somewhat antiquated) Beck with Beale.

I think maybe the most important point is this: The issue is *not* the ways and means by which Beale and Beck are comparable, in and of themselves. Maybe, as I reflect, my original posting was more prompted by the sense of the importance of mass, social reaction. To me, looking at that teeming crowd of extras on the set of Network, and the proto- and full-fledged teabaggers that tuned in to Beck, I think maybe what's more important is that the public readiness to tune in to televised anger/angst is the common denominator. Whether the target of that mass attention is a fictional Beale or an all-too-real Beck sort of pales in comparison against an examination of the social reality. And make no mistake: Chayefsky, in the end, had that bit of plausible deniability up his sleeve. When accused of admonishing the institution of network TV, he could always point out the essential role of the audience. I think the audience was, in the end, his real focus.

Thanks again, all. See yuz on the flip side.

Beck is quite similar to a host of others, from Ed Schultz to Sean Hannity to Rachel Maddow and beyond. They are all the same humans.

Beale was sincere. He was just nuts.

Beck is easier to compare with a televangelist. He uses all the televangelist tricks, and applies them to the same kind of faith-based idiots who want to believe something, no matter how irrational it is. Beck is more like Marjoe Gortner in Marjoe, except that Marjoe was kind of a nice guy even while he was exploiting people. He was selling them them b.s. that they wanted to buy.

Glenn Beck is a wanna-be Jim Jones. He's fascinated by how easily stupid people can be fooled and manipulated, and he likes to see how far he can take it. If you read up on Beck, his game becomes clear. Beck has a huge fetish for Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast, which panicked America because they thought it was real. Beck's even re-created it a few times because he's so intrigued by the power of fooling people. Back when he was a DJ, he did a "prank" where he got a whole town to turn out for the opening of an amusement park that didn't exist... just so he could laugh at the crowd that gathered in a vacant lot.

I'm not sure Beck actually believes any of the stuff he says, or if he just picked the right-wingers because they're church-trained and easier to fool. They're authoritarians and like to be told what to think and love media that reinforces what they already want to believe. That's why there are a zillion successful right-wing pundits on the radio (Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Levin, O'Reilley, Beck, etc.) and liberal radio tends to fail; the two groups have different mindsets and wants. So, Beck picked the group that he'd have the easiest time manipulating. And he's made a fortune off of them.

Beck is a grifter who'll tell anybody what they want to hear to keep getting money out of them and so he can keep laughing up his sleeve at the power he weilds over them.

Beale had no real agenda other than anger.