Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [96]
So if Glenn Beck comes knocking on your door with a stack of pamphlets about Van Jones’s latest conspiracy, be kind. He’s just a maligned victim of the terrible progressive conspiracy to destroy America and distribute the spoils to blacks, illegal immigrants, and American Indians.
11
AN APPEALING WONDROUS STORY
The Secret of Beck’s Success
You’ll notice a pattern in all stories: There are three kinds of characters: heroes, villains and there but for the grace of God go I.
—Glenn Beck
GLENN BECK IS no ordinary storyteller. There are many great American storytellers on television and radio, but very few run $32 million media empires and have had their tongues immortalized by Time magazine. Beck is entertaining for sure, but his true genius is his ability to spin stories that people believe.
Why do so many people believe Beck’s stories? We’ve already seen a few reasons. As we discussed in chapter 7, many people want to believe that they’re being persecuted because it enables them to rationalize their own feelings of intolerance. Thus, they employ confirmation bias and selective exposure to avoid challenging the plausibility of persecution narratives. In addition, we observed that people tend to seek explanations for incomprehensible and troubling phenomena, and they have a natural propensity to embrace ideas that appeal to their innate suspicions of marginal members of the community: scapegoats.
But just because people want to believe that they’re being persecuted, and just because they’re looking for answers that confirm their xenophobic suspicions, that does not mean they’ll believe any demagogue with a radio show. America’s airwaves host plenty of hate-radio shock jocks peddling all manner of conspiracy theories; most have only captured local or fringe audiences. That’s because most people are put off by raging crackpots. Confirmation bias only goes so far in facilitating outlandish beliefs. When the messenger lacks credibility, listeners reject the message. Persecution paranoia may be “the sweetest of drugs,” but without an efficient delivery mechanism, consumers will cough it up.
Rodeo Clown
Part of Beck’s potency is the packaging. He is the Joe Camel of right-wing paranoia, the goofy cartoon character who genially entertains while hawking addictive cancer sticks. He mocks himself relentlessly, calling himself a “rodeo clown” and his audience “sick twisted freaks.”ch1 The self-deprecation routine facilitates his conspiracism. Unlike other doomsday prophets, Beck never expresses dogmatic certainty about his predictions. Instead, he hesitantly speculates about “crazy” possibilities. When he first introduced Willard Cleon Skousen’s ideas to his audience, he warned, “I am absolutely about three days away from the loony bin. I’m practically damn near nuts.”2
But Beck isn’t damn near nuts at all, at least not in a clinical sense. The loony-bin routine is just part of his shtick. It’s a disarming tactic that gives him the latitude to promote conspiracy theories that O’Reilly would never touch. Nonetheless, the Beck-driven paranoia that has swept the country demonstrates that Beck’s audience gets the message all the same. Willard Cleon Skousen and Glenn Beck are both legendary cranks, but where Skousen was a fringe figure, Beck is America’s favorite television personality after Oprah Winfrey.
Frame Confusion
The Joe Camel analogy goes deeper than the pretty packaging. Like the big tobacco companies, Beck has also perfected his product with just the right combination of ingredients to facilitate delivery of the drug. To see how this process works, we’ll need to examine the way people interpret the world around them. Suppose that you observe some event out of context. For example, imagine that you’ve just watched a YouTube clip of someone getting hit in the face by a hurtling cream pie. You might ask yourself, “What is it that’s going on here?” The way you answer that question depends on how you contextualize it. You could interpret it as a