The McCarthyist Style in Glenn Beck's "White Culture"

Imagine if Glenn Beck were forced to defend some of his most irresponsible statements. Katie Couric gives it a go:



She could have pushed him harder, but still, it's good that she raised the question – what did you mean by "white culture"? ThinkProgress has a partial transcript. Crooks and Liars links some of the good recent articles on Beck (and their Beck category is pretty extensive).

I'd particularly recommend the Media Matters and Sidney Hillman Foundation pieces on the Time fluff piece on Beck (also this Balloon Juice commentary). Salon's series on The Making of Glenn Beck is good as well. Meanwhile, Evil Slutopia has a great roundup (from April) of Beck's most loathsome statements.

Beck's gutless dodging reminded me of that queen of political grifters, Ann Coulter. As I wrote in a long post on her, she simultaneously wants credit for being "outrageous" yet want to take no responsibility for her statements. It's a cowardly, dishonest display. Beck's doing the same thing here, and all of the new McCarthy gang have this tendency. Without irony, both Beck and Coulter have invoked McCarthy in a positive way. But their resistance to saying outright what they want to gives away the game. Beck's happy to call Obama a racist and inflame racial tensions – it's good for business – but acknowledging that what he's saying is racist is not good for business. The boycott against him might win him further fans from the lunatic fringe, but it puts off the mainstream. Some Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Beck as a result (see the C&L links above). But this is a further scam, because Beck works for conservative propaganda outlet Fox News, and he's spouting mostly standard issue, far right bullshit – even if it comes with his unique brand of crazy performance art on top.

Let's recall, we saw much of the same game from the McCain-Palin campaign, with their camp stoking bigotry, denying it only when forced to, and often blaming their own crap on the Obama camp. It was utterly despicable and shameless. Yet most media outlets hesitated to call it out, and even worse, some made excuses for it.

TBogg catches a right-wing furor over Janeane Garofalo making a similar point about the teabag crowd:



She's pretty accurate here.

These dynamics are central to coverage of Beck, from the whitewashing of his bigotry to the game of false equivalencies. From that Jamison Foser Media Matters piece (emphasis his):

Time continued:

The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" - the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country - is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

What in the world is Time talking about? This is a grotesque false equivalence. Conservatives have been yelling about President Obama being a secret Kenyan bent on sending granny to the Death Panel, comparing him to Hitler and Mao and Stalin and who-knows-who-else -- and that, apparently, is matched in intensity and paranoia by liberals pointing out this unhinged behavior? Insane.

Sadly, this is typical from the media. It's especially irresponsible because Beck is the "It" Boy of Paranoid Hatred for the moment, and it's dangerous to help sell "The Return of McCarthyism":



We know the damage these scoundrels do if they're not confronted.

Edited for typos and clarity. The final video doesn't seem to load in some browsers. If you find that's the case, you can view it here or here.

Murrow vs. McCarthy

A still from Good Night, and Good Luck

It appears we’ll finally have a good film that deals with Joe McCarthy. Guilty By Suspicion, focusing more specifically on the Hollywood blacklist, was well-intentioned but uneven at best. Meanwhile, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, while apparently not a classic for the ages, is quite a worthwhile film, reportedly with the added virtue of being accurate.

(I’ve always been somewhat ashamed that Joe McCarthy came from my birth state, Wisconsin. Other than mediocre beer, only good things should come from Wisconsin, like cheese, OshKosh jeans, and the Green Bay Packers.)

Clooney claims that every scene is verified by at least two sources, and in one of the more interesting choices, Joe McCarthy effectively plays himself — all his appearances are archival footage. Clooney takes the smaller role of Fred Friendly, while the always superb David Strathairn plays legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow.


Joseph McCarthy

It’s striking but perhaps not surprising that so few kids today know of McCarthy (to the point Clooney’s been asked, who’s the actor playing McCarthy? Clooney, ever the prankster, has thought of taking out “For Your Consideration” ads for his villain). I remember when studying McCarthy I was surprised to discover he had a relatively short reign, roughly 1950 to 1954, while the Hollywood blacklist in fact far outlasted him. Also, in addition to the harm caused by rumors and slander, there was indeed a physical blacklist (in 1997, PBS’ NewsHour piece interviewed two victims of the blacklist).

Some scholars point to Spartacus as the film that definitively broke the blacklist, because one of the Hollywood Ten, the great screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was prominently credited (amazingly, he penned two Oscar-winning screenplays under fronts during the blacklist!). Spartacus, however, didn’t come out until 1960, when McCarthy had been dead for three years. It’s hard to imagine how much people were terrified of the Dread Red Menace and terrorized by Joe McCarthy, with only a few people like Murrow and the great cartoonist Walt Kelly having the guts to take him on.

Kelly’s depiction of McCarthy as Simple J. Malarkey from Pogo

There are a number of articles on the film and Clooney. You can read The Los Angeles Times’ one here, The New York Times one here, Salon’s here (if you can stand navigating their site), The Guardian’s here, and if a remarkably cranky one here by a reviewer who professes his hatred for such similarly crappy fare as All the President’s Men and Quiz Show (sounds like a ringing endorsement!).

Clooney apparently closes the film with these lines from a famous speech by Murrow in 1958 to his fellow broadcasters:

"To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: there is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose?

"Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box."