On his Fox program last Friday (rebroadcast on Monday), Glenn Beck hosted a group of moms who theoretically represented what is on the minds of the American people. “Tonight,” he explained, “we're going to talk to actual people about what concerns average Americans.”
“When regular people oppose the government-run health care,” Beck explained, “and let their voices be heard at town halls and tea parties all across the country, they're labeled 'angry mobs' and 'tea-baggers,' and now, 'domestic terrorists,' 'gun-toting radicals.' Do these look like gun-toting radicals to you?”
Beck drove the point home: “I think you're going to find their concerns quite normal, indeed, and rational.”
So what are “normal” and “rational” concerns in the mind of Glenn Beck?
Average Americans believe that the Obama administration and the mainstream media are tearing America apart along racial lines
One of Beck's guests, an African-American woman named Mary Baker, stated her belief that “in this time in our nation, we should be together,” before lamenting that, “It seems like we're being so torn apart.” Beck asked who was to blame, and culprits were quickly assigned. “It's the government,” one guest said. “It's the media, for sure,” said another. Stephanie Scruggs, a 9-12 Project coordinator, was even more specific:
The only people I have heard doing the name-calling are Nancy Pelosi, the pundits on CNN, the pundits on ABC, NBC. I quit watching regular news on the night of the election when they called me a racist because I happen to live in the South and didn't vote for Barack Obama. So, I must be a racist. I don't watch them anymore.
Regarding Ms. Baker, she is the author of a recently published editorial entitled, “Why I am no longer an African American,” a piece she mentioned on Beck's program. The article argues that Obama's election “has resulted in even more racial division” and that we are witnessing a resurgence of “anti-American sentiments” stemming form “the Black Power Movement, Nation of Islam, or the Black Nationalist Movement.” “The classification of me as an African American,” Ms. Baker writes, “says that although I live in America, my loyalty and allegiance are to Africa.”
Ms. Baker concludes her piece with the following argument:
Is this division amongst us perpetrated by our very own government? It is obvious that the inspiration for the classification of African American has nothing to do with those born of African descent. It is a radical group of Black Americans who hold to the anti-American views of those shared by Jeremiah Wright, Professor Gates, Jesse Jackson, President Obama and many others who came out of the radical Civil Rights Movement.
Promoting the idea that Obama's election has turned black radicalism and nationalism into the official policies of the United States government is an explicit goal of the current conservative media movement. Stoking racial tensions is clearly a goal as well. And, as usual, the blame is fixed exactly 180 degrees away from where it should be. The promotion of such beliefs is not the work of the White House or MSNBC. Rather, it is Beck who is hyping the specter of race-based policies by invoking the theme of “reparations,” and it was media conservatives who called the president and his first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, racists. By contrast, it was President Obama who, during his first national speech in 2004, stated plainly and unequivocally, “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
Average Americans believe that vaccinations are part of a government plot to exert “control” over our families
On the program, Beck implied that he was against flu shots. “I'm talking to one of the top five doctors in the world,” he said (the world-renowned physician was not named), “and I'm trying to find out the flu. Am I going to allow the government to give my child a flu shot?”
“No, don't do it,” a mother responded." “Take them out of school,” said another. “You know what this is about?” a third guest asked. “One word -- it is about control.” Later in the program, a mother who was homeschooling her children explained her decision: “I didn't want them being exposed to everything that they're exposed to in schools. I didn't want to vaccinate even on the government's schedule.”
The list of government-mandated inoculations for children attending public and private schools includes such historically devastating diseases as hepatitis, pneumonia, whooping cough, measles, mumps, and polio. The fact that infection and death rates from these diseases have fallen so precipitously over the years is undoubtedly connected in large part to widespread inoculations. (A 2007 Harvard study estimated that 1.1 million cases of polio alone have been prevented in the United States.) And yet, Beck allowed his show to promote a generalized rejection of such a practice, one considered a staple of modern medicine.
Average Americans believe that the United Nations is stripping them of their right to raise their children as they see fit
On the program, a guest made the following claim, which Beck allowed to stand without challenge:
Parental rights are being taken away by the United Nations right now. Barbara Boxer is very involved with the United Nations Children's Rights Commission, trying to put our children's rights, including going to church, going to do homework, anything of that -- they can be taken out of your home.
The United Nations Special Commission on Human Rights is indeed focusing on issues involving children. As the commission's website explains:
While victims of injustice and poverty have always had trouble being heard, none have had more trouble, historically, than children. Whether exploited as child labourers or prostitutes, drafted as young teenagers into armed forces, forced as young girls into a lonely life as domestic workers, deprived of an education to work on the family farm, or denied adequate nutrition and health care, children need help and protection from an adult world that perpetrates most of the abuse.
Further statistics highlighted by the U.N. include:
In the last decade, an estimated two million children have been killed in armed conflict, many of them by some of the 100 million landmines thought to be concealed in 62 countries. A total of perhaps four to five million more have been disabled as a result of their experience in war, and more than 12 million have been made homeless.
And:
As for child labour, while experts agree that there are few accurate statistics available, the best estimates from the ILO [International Labour Organization] are that there are nearly 80 million children under 15 working as labourers. It is also estimated that the number of children under 18 involved in prostitution exceeds two million, one million of whom are in Asia and 300,000 in the United States.
Despite such horrific realities -- realities which the United Nations is at the very least publicizing in the hope that they might be addressed -- Beck allowed his program to serve as a forum for the broadcast of blatantly anti-U.N. views. The substance of the actual work of the U.N. Human Rights Commission was not addressed. This should be surprising, considering Beck's rage against the former ACORN employees who offered advice on how to set up a fake underage brothel.
Are these truly average Americans?
There were many other parts of the broadcast that are worthy of correction -- guests, for example, blamed Obama for “apologizing for freedom,” bowing “to kings,” and asking forgiveness “from dictators” -- all falsehoods that networks like Fox have actively pushed, even cropping the president's words in a deliberately deceptive fashion to make the point.
But the central question viewers should ask themselves after watching a show like this one is the following: Are these the kind of views we want to become “average” in America? Beck is doing his best to create such a reality. The confusion and misguided concern that result from his misinformation are obvious for all to see, and should make the deleterious nature of the conservative media machine all the more apparent.