Before she died, Mary gave Glenn a present that would illuminate his life’s path: a record collection of classic radio broadcasts called The Golden Age of Radio. “I was mesmerized by the magic radio was,” Beck remembers, “how it could create pictures in my head.”19 He became a student of the art form, idolizing pioneers like Orson Welles and practicing his radio voice into a tape recorder in his bedroom.
By the time he was a junior in high school, Beck was commuting to Seattle by bus every weekend to broadcast on a local FM rock station. He was also on the road to smoking pot every day for the next fifteen years (by his own estimation) and spinning records by late ’70s white-bread rock troika of Cheap Trick, Supertramp and Electric Light Orchestra.
Rock ’n’ roll radio would be Glenn Beck’s university. By 1983, at the age of nineteen, Beck was the youngest morning radio show host in the nation, broadcasting from the military enclave of Corpus Christi, Texas. He was a one-man Morning Zoo, with on-air skits and imaginary guests like a clueless Muppet-voiced foil Beck named “Clydie Clyde,” which still appears in his act.
Beck’s mentor and manager at the station was a former marine and surfing Mormon named Jim Sumpter. “I never had a doubt that Glenn was headed for huge things,” Sumpter told me on the phone from his radio show studio in Florida, “but I didn’t see any indication of an interest in politics. I never for a moment dreamt that Glenn was, based on his lifestyle choices, a political conservative. If you asked me if Glenn would have ever been on the cover of Time magazine I would have asked you what you were smoking.”
Beck was channeling the decade of excess, doing cocaine, driving a DeLorean and cultivating a collection of thin ties. He played the fool but did not suffer fools. “When we were in Texas, Glenn hated Texans, hated ’em,” Sumpter said. “Now he talks about how he just loves the people in Texas. He used to make fun of them—their belt buckles, the chunky jewelry, I mean the whole deal. And he just hated Mormons.”
It wasn’t just Mormons. Beck’s self-described mantra at the time was “I hate people.” Despite occasionally sharing the mic with a chimp named Zippy, despair was seeping in and Beck’s mood swings were alienating colleagues; one remembered him as “a sadist, the kind of guy who rips the wings off flies.” His competitive edge could certainly contain a cruel streak. When he faced off against a former friend in the Phoenix market, Beck called up the man’s wife on air after she had a miscarriage and mocked his friend-turned-rival, saying it was evidence that he couldn’t do anything right—he couldn’t even have a baby.20
Beck’s own personal life was suffering. His first marriage was crumbling and a daughter was born with cerebral palsy. Amid drug use and manic behavior, Beck wrestled with suicidal fantasies, writing later, “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it. . . . Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I’m only alive today because (a) I’m too cowardly to kill myself . . . and (b) I’m too stupid.”21
By his late twenties, the one-time radio wunderkind had burned most professional bridges and found himself working at a radio station in New Haven, a comparative Siberia from previous postings. Divorced and with drug use and alcoholism spiraling out of control, Beck hit bottom. He went to his first AA meeting in 1994 and began a skeptic’s search for faith, starting with a self-taught great books seminar that included tomes from Hitler, Carl Sagan and Pope John Paul II and culminating with his baptism into the Mormon Church.
Personal rebirth was followed by professional rebirth. Clean, sober and remarried, Beck was tiring of the bubble-gum Top-40 morning-zoo format. Talk radio icons like Rush Limbaugh and WABC’s race-baiting Bob Grant were his on-air idols now. Beck began peppering his banter with political references and pushing executives for a talk show to call his own. In January 2000, the Glenn Beck show debuted in Tampa Bay. “I don’t really consider myself a conservative. I know I don’t consider myself a liberal,” he said. “I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes.”22
In 2006, CNN’s Headline News brought him to cable television to host a political talk show from an independent perspective. But Beck chafed against the billing and enjoyed only middling ratings. He was liberated by an offer from Fox News and the election of Barack Obama.
The Glenn Beck Program debuted on Fox News the night before Obama’s inauguration, and he came out swinging. Sarah Palin was among the first night’s guests. and within weeks Beck was pumping up “the Road to Communism” and offering “Comrade Updates,” declaring “the destruction of the West is happening”23 and that “the president is a Marxist . . . who is setting up a class system.”24
Sometimes he pivoted his imagery to the right, saying “The government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state”25 and claiming that “the federal government is slowly drifting into fascism.” Other times he indulged both sides of the spectrum, as on April 2, when Beck asked, “Is this where we’re headed?” and showed images of Hitler, Lenin and Stalin.26
Beck’s opposition to the health-care bill in the summer of ’09 hit all the bases. First there was fascism, as in the “[health-care] system is going to come out the other side dictatorial—it’s going to come out a fascist state.”27 Then there was health care as “good old socialism . . . raping the pocketbooks of the rich to give to the poor.”28 And finally, race: “The health care bill is reparations. It’s the beginning of reparations.”29
Beck’s ratings soared, and his credibility was bolstered by on-air investigations into Obama personnel like “Green Jobs czar” Van Jones, who had in fact once described himself as a communist and signed a 9/11 Truther petition calling for an investigation into whether President Bush had known in advance about the attacks of September 11th. Beck hammered home the story while other news outlets resisted it. Jones ultimately resigned. Beck had both a scoop and a scalp.
Beck’s newfound firebrand politics and effectiveness in driving the news cycle had some old friends scratching their heads. “I never got the impression that Glenn is as naturally curious as he appears to be, to be bringing the information forward that he is,” said Jim Sumpter. “I don’t know if Glenn’s being fed or if Glenn’s really the driving force. I have no idea. If he’s the driving force, that’s a Glenn Beck I never saw. If he’s being fed, then the showmanship that goes into all of this is classic Beck. Now if Glenn is the showman and the driving force behind bringing the information to the forefront, then, then I think we’re probably looking at near genius in terms of what he’s doing . . . [but] I don’t think this is Glenn. The catalyst in this thing is not Glenn. Glenn’s the vehicle, not the catalyst.”
Catalyst or not, Beck was hitting all the Wingnut themes with perfect pitch. When Iowa’s court legalized gay marriage, Beck declared, “I believe this case is actually about going into churches, and going in and attacking churches and saying, ‘You can’t teach anything else.’”30 To nervous gun rights advocates, he asserted that Obama “will slowly but surely take away your gun or take away your ability to shoot a gun, carry a gun.”31 He brought avowed secessionists on his show and gave them an interested hearing. Beck drew the widest denunciations when he called President Obama “a racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”32 An advertiser boycott began, but the zealotry of his advocates more than compensated as yet another Beck book went up the charts in 2009. First there was Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government and then Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government, featuring Beck leering on the cover in a Soviet-style commissar’s uniform.
In the books, as on air, it’s always a wrestling match between the Good Beck—humorous, self-effacing and calling on a higher power for a sense of purpose—and the Bad Beck, peddling political apocalypse, the opinion equivalent of a horror film: “We are a country that is headed towards socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination.”33 “There is a coup going on. There is a stealing o
f America . . . done through the guise of an election.”34
Beck’s message resonates beyond Main Street and the Tea Party protests. Down in the white supremacy cesspool of Stormfront, some contributors thought they recognized a fellow traveler. “Glen [sic] Beck can be useful,” wrote SS_marching. “When Glen beck said ‘Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People’ he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such.”35
Frequent Stormfront poster Thor357 sees Beck as a recruiting tool: “I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it’s amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them.”36 Carolina Patriot poster takes a down-home view: “Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I’ll turn over to Glenn Beck if he’s on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show ideas.”37
QHelios gives Beck the benefit of the doubt: “By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok . . . He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that.”38
Olbermania
In the beginning there was Phil Donahue. The soft and snowy-haired advocate of liberal causes, a caring, not confrontational ’70s-style talk show host—he wanted to feel your pain.
Then there was Keith Olbermann—he wants you to feel his pain.
Liberals’ new assertiveness accompanied the rise of this unlikely on-air advocate, a sportscaster turned straight news anchor turned partisan pit bull.
Smart, funny and acerbic, Olbermann also has a reputation for being prickly and paranoid. But his instinct to pick fights provided important utility: At a time when conservative opinion anchors were ruling the cable news world, Keith Olbermann decided to return fire.
Here’s a measure of his success. When Olbermann started his eight p.m. show, Countdown, on MSNBC in 2003 there were no overtly liberal prime-time anchors in all of cable news. Now his network is seen as the liberal corollary to Fox, featuring a full line-up of liberals in the orbit of his eight p.m. slot.
Aiming to echo the moral authority of Edward R. Murrow down to his lift of “Good Night and Good Luck,” Olbermann trades in self-righteous indignation. His signature schtick is the special commentary, five minutes of Keith staring right into the camera delivering a diatribe that he has written himself. It’s a radio sermon made for TV, delivered in a born broadcaster’s baritone. His targets are anyone—or anything—to his political right.
It’s tempting to describe his commentary style as full-contact, to reach for an available sports metaphor for combat, but it wouldn’t be accurate—because Olbermann doesn’t have guests on his show who disagree with him. It is an amen corner, an echo chamber presented as a truth-telling moment for America. Keith Olbermann isn’t interested in any opinion but his own.
Like his rising alter-ego Glenn Beck, Olbermann had his roots in radio, a precocious if isolated teenager running a half-watt station at his high school in Westchester, New York, and then graduating to the Cornell University radio station. His love of radio is evident in his pauses and diction, delivering a point with dramatic effect. He doesn’t talk so much as deliver.
But it wasn’t politics but sports that drove him, and after bouncing around local sportscaster gigs in regional markets, he landed at ESPN in 1992, selected to co-host SportsCenter at eleven p.m. with Dan Patrick. Their repartee redefined the model, with amped-up humor and sly asides (“If you’re scoring at home, or even if you’re alone . . .”) they mocked the formalities of the format and made the show an event, a return to the frat house for exhausted adults. Most of all, they made the news fun to watch, a lesson that would last.
But Olbermann did not last at ESPN. In 1997, at the height of his public popularity as a sportscaster he left. One colleague recalled, “He didn’t burn bridges, he napalmed them.”39
Olbermann’s reputation as a malcontent would dog him as he hosted shows on Fox and MSNBC. Sometimes contracts were not renewed, sometimes he was fired. After an ESPN exposé portrayed Keith as a sour, insular man who made co-host Suzy Kolber cry after shows, Olbermann felt compelled to write a public mea culpa in Salon.com. More than a face-saving PR stunt, the 2002 essay was a reflective walk through Olbermann’s psyche, full of competing insecurities and perfectionism: “I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong,” he wrote. “If anything would have cut through my neuroses, it would’ve been a colleague’s tears. If I had known, I think I could’ve jumped over the fence I’d built around myself and said what the inner guy always knew: No TV show is worth crying over. Suzy: I’m sorry.”40
In 2003, Olbermann got a rare second chance to host a prime-time show on a network he’d left on strained terms, MSNBC. Countdown was a late March replacement for Phil Donahue’s brief return to television, a ratings failure that was seen as the end of experimenting with liberal views in prime time. “MSNBC takes sharp right turn,” was one typical reading of the tea leaves. Ironically, the night of Olbermann’s debut, he announced, “Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news. . . . News is news. We will not be screwing around with it.”
He played it straight down the middle and enjoyed middling ratings. He cultivated a feud with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, naming him one of “the worst persons in the world” more than fifty times in four years.41 He re-enacted news stories with puppets (another thing he shares with Glenn Beck). Humor was his calling card as a news broadcaster. His personal political beliefs were unknown even to people close to him, and Olbermann has said he doesn’t vote.42
But that profile changed dramatically in August 2006. Then-general manager Dan Abrams had written a memo encouraging hosts to offer opinions on air. Waiting for a flight at LAX, Olbermann happened upon a speech given by Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in which he compared opponents of the administration’s war and counter-terror strategy to Nazi appeasers, saying that America was fighting “a new type of fascism.” Fired up and fueled by a few screwdrivers, Olbermann wrote his first special comment.
“The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a quack,” he began. “Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.” Olbermann accused the secretary of impugning “the morality or intelligence—indeed, the loyalty—of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. . . . This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely. And as such, all voices count—not just his.”43
It was a forceful but odd addition to prime time, a counter-speech with an inner history nerd erupting from within: Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Hitler, Nixon, Joe McCarthy, General Curtis LeMay and Ed Murrow all mentioned within five minutes. The audiences loved it. The special commentaries continued and ratings spiked along with the rhetoric.
Olbermann offered thirteen more special commentaries in 2006, dialing up the outrage, casting himself as the liberal avenger against the Bush administration. “Bush: Pathological Liar or Idiot-in-Chief?” he asked. He accused Bush of “panoramic and murderous deceit,” having an “addled brain” and “laying waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives” and told the president to “Shut the hell up!”—all in one broadcast. He argued that “the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party,”44 called on Bush to resign, hinted at impeachable offenses and—in an apocalyptic riff worthy of Glenn Beck—said his policies could bring about “the beginning of the end of America.”45 All this led New York magazine to pay him the ultimate bittersweet compliment, calling Olbermann “the Limbaugh of Lefties.”
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler, Olbermann’s wrath was again predictably vast. “Invoking the German
dictator who subjugated Europe; who tried to exterminate the Jews; who sought to overtake the world is not just in the poorest of taste, but in its hyperbole, it insults not merely the victims of the Third Reich, but those in this country who fought it and defeated it.”46
True. But Olbermann himself couldn’t help but wade into the hyperbole and equivalency game at times, calling Bush a “fascist” and acting “dictatorial.” One of his favorite routines was offering a Nazi Sieg Heil salute while holding a picture of Bill O’Reilly across his face, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to write a strained letter of complaint. “Your repeated use of the Nazi salute has resulted in many complaints from our constituents, including Holocaust survivors and their families. . . . In light of these concerns, we hope that you will reconsider your use of the Nazi salute in the future.”47
The subject of rival Fox News drove Olbermann even deeper into a frenzy of moral equivalency. “Al-Qaeda really hurt us but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than al-Qaeda—worse for our society. It’s as dangerous an organization as the Ku Klux Klan ever was. Fox News will say anything about anybody and accepts no criticism. Half the people there ought to be in an insane asylum.”48 Pot, meet kettle.
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America Page 11
