Glenn Beck Had Better Kill Us
Posted on October 29, 2009
By Joe Miller |
Glenn Beck is comparatively uneducated, but somehow he’s making millions from his show on Fox News, his radio show, and book deals. He grew up in Mount Vernon, Washington, a place that is 75.44% White. He went to Sehome High School in Bellingham, Washington, a town that is 87.88% White. He never graduated from college (he went to Yale under a special admittance program but dropped out). A person of color would have a hard time with such a lack of exposure, perpetuated by weak credentials–they would be attacked as being beneficiaries of affirmative action: You’re from Harlem and you never graduated from college? Go work as a supermarket cashier.
Not a single African-American, Latino, Asian-American, or American Indian prime time talk show is currently being broadcast on any of the major broadcast or cable television networks. This is despite the fact that these groups make up 34% of the population. But Glenn Beck, et al. want us to believe they’ve been victimized.
Hiring Glen Beck is by design, of course. It doesn’t matter if he’s right or wrong. Fox simply wants to galvanize their core audience to save a withering right-wing attack machine.
The most recent of a series attacks being orchestrated by Beck and his followers is against Mark Lloyd, the FCC’s Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer, to whom Beck and others refer as the diversity “Czar.”
Zogby engineered a biased poll to promote a book it’s selling on how the Obama administration is supposedly trying to curtail free speech. Mischaracterizing a statement Lloyd made about the difficulty of balancing competing interests when promoting diversity, the poll falsely asks survey respondents whether it’s ok that the FCC wants to “force good white people out for African-Americans and gays.” This interpretation of Lloyd’s statement is utterly inaccurate.
The prevalence of Glenn Beck’s views, and the dearth of viewpoints, outside of blogs like this, of people who make up over a third of the population, is precisely why we must not back down from demanding a media that represents us all. This means that we demand enforcement of equal opportunity laws and policies designed to improve broadband adoption rates in neglected communities. We must ask ourselves, “Who’s really suppressing free speech? The handful of companies that have a stranglehold on content and media ownership, that employ dimwitted poltroons like Glen Beck, while hiring few, if any, qualified non-white hosts? Or an administration seeking to enforce a Congressional mandate to promote media ownership diversity and counter discrimination?”
