Terra Incognita

…By saying that maybe, just maybe Glenn Beck is a journalist.  He’s not, and he’s even said as much.

The article starts by noting how in the past week, since the cover-story on him in TIME, other publications have offered their own take on him from the New York Times, Salon and Saturday Night Live.   Now the Columbia Journalism Review decides to look at what he is, given that these analysis’ have been anywhere from satirical criticism to the puffiest of puff-pieces.

It illustrates all this as a “problem”:

Journalists, after all, are, among other things, cartographers: they map their subjects, charting their locations upon the rocky terrain of our shared cultural life. As such, they also prefer to perceive—and present—politics as playing themselves out upon a continuum of convenient dichotomies: liberal versus conservative, establishment versus anti-establishment, etc. And they prefer those who engage in politics, from within or without, to adhere to these confines. Rush Limbaugh: conservative. Keith Olbermann: liberal. Et cetera. Journalists prefer, in other words, to set the terms of political engagement.

But Beck refuses to follow the rules. He refuses, even, to acknowledge the existence of any rules in the first place. He is not quite conservative; he is not quite anti-establishment. And the fundamental incoherence of his expressed political positions—which, as Nate Silver points out, are actually quite in line, in their incoherence itself, with the eclectic hodgepodge of most Americans’ political views—thwarts the angled lines of our narrow political frames. Beck is his own gurgling amalgam of definitions, his own strange blend of identities and anxieties. He denies, finally, to be mapped—by denying the legitimacy of the map itself.

First, let’s acknowledge where Glenn Beck is:  he’s on the fringe of American politics, and as long as the above description applies to him, that’s where he’ll stay.  Other fringers like Alex Jones also bark about how the two-party system is an illusion to distract everyone from the new world order that really controls things.  Lou Dobbs, who panders to the fringe, likes to say that he’s an independent-populist, which I don’t really buy since he works for a multi-national corporation and it’s difficult to be a populist then.

It’s not that Glenn Beck’s ideas, ridiculous as they are, are fringe.  It’s that he is more interested in stirring up the pot.  The Salon piece mentioned talks about his fascination with Orson Wells’ production of “War of the Worlds” that whipped the country into a panic when it was broadcast.  One of Beck’s heroes is Howard Beale, from “Network” who says at one point that “[TV] is the most awesome goddamn force in the whole godless world.”  Beck has said that he identifies with Beale because “When he came out of the rain and he was like, none of this makes any sense. I am that guy,” according to Beck.

Beck isn’t Howard Beale because, as BuzzFlash put it in their criticism of the TIME piece: “Howard Beale was a troublemaker because he spoke the truth in a sea of lies, while Glenn Beck lies, well, in a bigger sea of lies. Beale was ‘mad as hell’ because the truth had difficulty getting through, because lies dominate the airwaves.”

The most depressing paragraph in the CJR article is the last one:

The doors to American journalism are open wider than they have ever been before. That’s a good thing, generally; but it also means, of course, a decline in the power journalists have to define the spaces and set the terms of our political conversation. And it means that the story we tell ourselves about who we are no longer contains a single plot line. It is now a jumble, populated—and, increasingly, defined by—characters like Glenn Beck. In that way, Beck is a kind of printing press incarnate—revolutionary, explosive, and teeming with attendant anxieties. He is a tongue-wagging metaphor for the cognitive confusion of our journalistic moment. He is, among everything else, a reminder of the new world that professional journalists must come to terms with—a world in which one answer to the question of ‘who is a journalist?’ might just be: Glenn Beck.

Just who can put their opinions out there has widened dramatically over the last several years.  But what constitutes a “journalist” has not changed.  Glenn Beck doesn’t get to be called a journalist (not least of all by CJR) because he’s popular and has a Lyndon LaRouche-esque movement building around him.

So two conservative film makers dressed up as a pimp and prostitute and went into ACORN offices and asked for assistance, with the pimp mentioning that he had a made up honduran child prostitution ring.

As a result of the anger, Congress voted to cut off all federal funds from going to ACORN (which might be unconstitutional) and while the anger is justified, there are other companies getting money from the government still that carry out worse crimes than pretending to set up a fake honduran child-prostitution ring (like murder, or buttshots with vodka).

Also, ACORN is planning to sue the filmmakers because one of the offices they walked into and pulled this stunt was in Baltimore.  Unlike most states, which require one-person consent for electronic surveillance, Maryland requires that all parties consent.  I wonder if anyone’s mentioned that this is the same law that Linda Tripp broke when she recorded Monica Lewinsky’s telephone calls and turned them over to Ken Starr on the condition that she be given immunity to that law.

Fox News has always taken jabs at CNN for having a “liberal bias.”  When they started up, they were doing that and presenting themselves as an alternative.  For a while, CNN did the respectible thing and ignored their competition.

Well, they reached the breaking point last week.  Fox News put ads for itself in the Washington Post claiming that no other network covered the 9/12 tea party protests (which a Fox producer was caught egging the crowd on) and Rick Sanchez at CNN had had enough.

Okay.  Rick has criticized Fox and other select idiots before.  But it’s become so much more than just this rant.  CNN’s now promoting itself by criticizing Fox in a similar vein:

So far, it looks like CNN is winning, since Fox had to send a memo to its staff telling them to be “journalistic” and not exhibit bias.  You know, the sort of thing news reporters are SUPPOSED to do.  Meanwhile, the rest of us will go on and not require a memo to tell us not to be biased.

And it makes me rip my hair out every time a new development comes out about it.  It’s another development about John Edwards’ affair.  A new book is coming out by an ex-aide of Edwards, Andrew Young, who says that Rielle Hunter had a child with John Edwards, and that…

According to the newspaper, Young wrote that Edwards once told Hunter they would wed after Edwards’ wife, who has cancer, died.

Edwards told Hunter that the ceremony would be held on a rooftop in New York and the Dave Matthews Bands would make an appearance, the newspaper said, citing its examination of the book proposal.

Excuse me while I go yell things.

Makes me want to learn flash (h/t to Global Sociology Blog)

Ah, the glory that is user generated content. Cheers.

First there was PostSecret, now reddit has decided to invite people to share their deep feelings and secrets on their IAmA subreddit.  It’s been active for three months and its very active, which is impressive, since there are a lot of subreddits that just wither out after a few weeks.

Someone at Variety likes their thesaurus.  Maybe if they looked at urban dictionary, they might understand why its even funnier.

Rod Blagojevich is about to start his federal corruption trial.  His former chief fundraiser Christopher Kelly was about to be trialed along with him, but he died this evening at Stroger hospital after overdosing on an over-the-counter medication.  Many people surrounding Blagojevich have abandoned him, his two lawyers that were supposed to represent him at his impeachment hearing quit before the Illinois senate conducted the trial and everyone in the Democratic party has done everything to distance themselves from Blagojevich.

Says Bill Maher.  A good pep talk.