Glen Beck: Vapid and Lacking in Substance

[elfs]

Over the past three or four weeks, on those mornings when I drive, I've been listening to Glen Beck, and I have come to a conclusion: Glen Beck is the most vapid, most irrelevant, most boring voice nationally syndicated on morning radio. He's the substance-free love child of Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh, as incurious about the world around him as Sarah Palin. His voice would be a mellifluous, soothing thing if it didn't host the perpetual hint of whine, a whine that comes out whenever he gets agitated. Glen Beck doesn't get mad, he just snivels at a higher pitch and volume.

I think I've absorbed about six hours of Glen Beck in total, and really, there's not much to report about. Glen said almost nothing of interest in that six hours. Mid-1980's bandwidth could support his entire train of thought. He pimped his new book a lot, in a way that reminded me far too much of Bob Larson. He talked endlessly about how he believed in "the future of America."

The main focus of the Glen Beck show is: Glen Beck. Glen Beck talks about how he searches out the wisest minds and begs them to convince him he's wrong. He's almost never wrong. When he is wrong, he claims, it's because the expert's vision of America's future is "grimmer" [sic] than his own. At one point, I had to turn it off not because I had reached the end of my journey, but because Glen announced that he was "like Socrates," seeking the truth (and he assured his readers that this made them just like him) going around to the wisest men he knew and revealing that they didn't know anything and that he expected, "like Socrates," for the wise and powerful to come down on him someday and that he would suffer the same fate "like Socrates."

I believe Socrates was actually charged with corrupting the morals of youth. Oh, if only.

Beck described not one fact, one event, one incident, not one concrete idea or principle, with which one could actually argue: there was nothing there. His entire show was air and fog and dim, dim illumination. Why is he even on the air?

Comments

[blaisepascal]

Would it be considered a threat to send him a letter citing how much he expressed a desire to be "like Socrates" and include a recipe for hemlock?

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Why is he even on the air?

There's a big, big market for substance-free entertainment masquerading as journalism? New/Big/Challenging ideas frighten people, so if all you want is a competitive share of the overall audience, dress up non-issues and bill yourself as a wise and infallible guru about them. People can listen, turn off their brains, and feel like something of value is sloshing between their ears just so long as they don't subject it to any of that awful, sticky Critical Thinking Crap.

Limbaugh on Quaaludes, maybe?

[mrf-arch.livejournal.com]

They call it the Right Wing Noise Machine and not the Right Wing Content Machine for a reason. :-)

It fails to surprise me that without a clear alpha figure to worship, there would be a turn towards ever more transparent self-promotion among the right-wing punditocracy. They need to fill airtime, but why chance backing any particular horse in the bloody race for dominance of the GOP (and movement conservatism in general) now, when you can stay out of the fray and then just fall into line behind whoever wins?