St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans calls Glenn Beck a “master media manipulator” in a new piece looking at the Fox News host's weekend spectacle.
Deggans notes that other media outlets were “pushed” to offer Beck significant airtime even though he works for a rival network -- a network that Deggans argues may have “under-covered” the event. He concludes that Beck's admonishment to his followers that “we must get the poison of hatred out of us” could easily be applied to Beck's own radio and television programs.
Deggans writes:
But by creating such a massively controversial event on a typically slow news day, Beck also pushed his competitors into a corner. If CNN wanted to serve its brand as an unbiased news source, it had to cover his rally significantly, despite the fact that it also gave significant, complimentary face time to one of its own biggest competitors.
Indeed, as the rally was unfolding Saturday, C-SPAN (which aired the rally uninterrupted) and CNN covered the rally more than Fox News, which stuck with its originally scheduled programming rather than present continuous coverage. This meant Fox's competitors were spending a lot more time dissecting the massive crowd Beck brought to the Mall, presumably reaching viewers who might be interesting in checking out his show Monday to see more.
It's a sad development when political considerations keep a news channel from covering an event that was talked about all week and was likely the biggest news event of the day. Often, media critics complain about politically-oriented news channels over-covering events to serve their purposes; in the case of Beck's rally, you could argue Fox News under-covered it for the same reasons -- avoiding criticism for supporting one of its stars by downplaying an event of massive interest to its audience.
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At a moment when ultra-conservative Tea Party activists need to look more mainstream to independent voters before a crucial midterm election, Beck just handed them the blueprint for keeping conservative supporters in the fold while downplaying their most divisive beliefs.
Of course, Beck being Beck, he also contradicted himself. “We must get the poison of hatred out of us,” he said at one point. “We must defend those who disagree with us.” But in the past, Beck has called the President of the United States a Marxist, whose health care policy amounts to “reparations,” insisting he is a racist who hates white people. He said on Fox News Sunday that “people aren't recognizing [President Obama's] version of Christianity.” That sure felt like a veiled reference to persistent, mistaken beliefs that Obama is a Muslim, though Beck has criticized Obama's ties to controversial Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Maybe Beck's move toward eliminating hatred could start with his own radio and TV appearances.
Previously: