American newsweeklies are at a dangerous pass, treading close to irrelevancy. Like newspapers, they’ve seen their ad revenue and readerships plummet. And even more than newspapers, they don’t know what they want to be. This uncertainty shapes everything they try to do, and makes for a strange reading experience. Once, you knew where they stood – and in the Henry Luce era that was sometimes appalling. Then, you didn’t really know where they stood, but the reporting was pretty solid. Now, you still don’t know where they stand, and the reporting is becoming irrelevant. The latest example of this is the current Time cover story on Glenn Beck, headlined Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? The writer is the talented David Von Drehle, formerly of the Miami Herald and Washington Post.
Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Yet on so many levels, this piece disappoints. It has justifiably been criticized because it immediately falls into a false equivalency trap from which it never escapes, attributing the estimates of 70,000 marchers at last weekend’s 9/12 protest to “liberal sources” and much higher, fantastical estimates of “perhaps as many as a million” to “conservative sources.” You see what he’s trying to do – people on the left and right choose to live in hermetic, separate realities constructed by biased media, etc. Except that the 70,000 estimate was almost certainly in the ballpark, and that number wasn’t ginned up by “liberal sources.” It’s nutty to juxtapose it with the “1 million” figure. Liberals and conservatives may live in separate realities, but one of those realities is, at the moment, way out of whack.
All summer long we’ve been treated to the spectacle of the American right seething about … what? The ratio of the federal deficit to GDP in 2013? Incipient communism? A presidential cult of personality? An American Gestapo? I still don’t know exactly, but a lot of people on the right have made it clear they really, really don’t like Barack Obama. There’s a lot of anxiety – economic, social, cultural – loosed on the land right now, and conservatives, so ill-served by the Bush administration, are effectively leaderless and ideologically adrift. Beck fills that void – with a lot of crazy nonsense, but he fills it. How can a story claim give us a thoughtful perspective on Beck without acknowledging that reality? Instead, the piece employs a triangulating, politically agnostic approach so that no one, including Beck, is offended.
With its breezy tone and above-it-all point of view, the piece lacks any discernible analytical bite. It’s all pretty silly, Von Drehle seems to be saying. Those paranoiac Americans on the left and right, they can’t get enough of this stuff, and they buy a lot of books and watch a lot of TV ads, so it’s big money for Beck. But why is Beck popular right now? Why is the right in such a tizzy, and where is this going? These are the core conclusions:
We’re in a flood stage, and who’s to blame? The answer is like the estimates of the size of the crowd in Washington: Whom do you trust? Either the corrupt, communist-loving traitors on the left are causing this, or it’s the racist, greedy warmongers on the right, or maybe the dishonest, incompetent, conniving media, which refuse to tell the truth about whomever you personally happen to despise.
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We never find out what happens to the people watching [Howard "I'm Mad As Hell"] Beale. Do they stay mad forever? Does their screaming ever lead to something better? Does the rage merely migrate, sending new audiences with new enemies to scream from more windows? And if the time comes when every audience is screaming, who, in the end, is left to listen?
Even if you take this as it’s apparently meant to be taken, as a meditation not on politics but on popular culture, these are just empty generalizations: There’s universal mistrust. Nobody ever stops shouting. What a shame. A piece about anger, politics and mass media ought to show some passion itself. Instead, its Olympian musings are cautious and noncommittal.
Beck is an interesting character. Time could have gone in several directions with a cover story. It could have taken a stand (“Beck Is Bad For America,” no question mark), like it did with Joe McCarthy. Newsmagazine editors keep citing the Economist as a model – this was a perfect opportunity, passed by. Or, without being judgmental, Time could have taken Beck’s influence and the sorry state of political discourse seriously. Why this guy, now?
Time aspires at minimum to be water-cooler fodder, and ideally to help set the nation’s cultural/political tone, as it once did. But it needs to earn that all over again. That requires taking risks.
