Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [95]
Storyteller
But Beck has a second reason for clinging to his bad guys, less psychological and more cynical. The media portrayed Jones’s resignation and ACORN’s collapse as Beck victories, comparing the fall of his enemies to captured scalps.59 But for all his Nazi-hunter bluster, Beck isn’t actually interested in collecting scalps. There’s no money in scalps. Beck earns his living not by forcing progressives to resign but by spinning tales about them. As he himself likes to say, “I’m a storyteller.”60
Ever since Obama’s election, Beck has been composing an epic saga for national television. There are good guys—the freedom-loving Americans. There are bad guys—the Constitution-hating progressives. There are heroes—Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, “progressive hunter.” There are villains—Van Jones, Andy Stern, and ACORN. And there is a grand battle for the fate of the nation, of which the health care debate has been one skirmish. Each night, Beck presents the next installment in this riveting made-for-television docudrama. He has literally built a media empire around his conspiracy saga. According to Forbes magazine, Beck “has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth”—$13 million a year from print, $10 million from radio, $4 million on the web, $3 million from speaking events, and $2 million from television.61
If all the bad guys in Beck’s blockbuster saga walked off the scene before the final battle, it would ruin the story. He needs his villains. Thus, he soon resurrected Van Jones as a Soros-backed progressive strategist in a program that he titled, “The Resurrection of Van Jones.”62 He reconstituted ACORN as a network of covert cells: “While ACORN is going underground with yet another name change, their words are becoming much more dangerous and meaningful.”63 When discussing the SEIU, Beck still plays ominous video clips of Andy Stern’s speeches as if the guy had never left.64
Nonetheless, the departure of Beck’s bogeymen has taken some of the wind from his sails. His ratings plummeted in April and May to 1.8 million viewers, which is still exceptional for a 5:00 p.m. timeslot but only 50 percent of his peak in late 2009.65cg Beck being Beck, he blamed his troubles on a progressive conspiracy. First he practiced denial, accusing Media Matters of fabricating the rating decline.66 Then he told viewers of an “unholy alliance” seeking to shut him down. With his handy blackboard and sticky pictures, Beck connected the dots from Media Matters to Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY)—who raised questions about a company that hocks gold on Beck’s shows—to his old friends Van Jones and Andy Stern. “Now it’s official,” Beck stated. “McCarthy has appeared.”67 That would be Joseph McCarthy, the senator who hunted down the secret communist conspiracy controlling the government.
Beck being Beck, he also claimed that the conspirators were pursuing the old slippery slope sneak attack in order to achieve total suppression of the media. He described his enemy’s strategy as follows:
Do it small. Take them out one at a time. I’m just the first. And if you take me out, then what happens? Does O’Reilly go? Does Sean [Hannity] go? Do you go? Once they clean this place out, then who goes? Is it Diane Sawyer, is it Stephanopoulos? Who is it? Who is next? I’ve never seen anything like it before. This—the Nixon enemy list? Please. This is nothing like that. This is targeting and destroying.68
But don’t worry; all is not yet lost. Beck is still hanging in there, and he has courageously sworn that he will not be stopped. The evil progressives will have to tear the microphone from his cold, dead hands. He vowed:
Let me tell you this: They shut me down on radio, that’s fine, I’ll do TV. They shut me down on TV, that’s fine, I’ll do Internet. They shut me down on the Internet, that’s fine, I’ll do stage shows. They shut me down on stage shows, that’s fine, I’ll go door to door. You will have to shoot me