What is the number one watched program on cable news? If you guessed The O’Reily Factor, as I’m sure most of you did, you’d be correct. Bill is averaging these days close to three million viewers on any given weekday. In case you were curious, that’s about twice as many people as The Daily Show, while the major networks evening news shows can expect somewhere between 4.5 million and 8 million.

OK, so here’s a tougher one: Who is #2? I’ll give you a hint: he’s also on Fox News.

If you guess Sean Hannity, that Fox News stalwart, you’d be close… but you’d also be wrong. In fact, this summer Glenn Beck has been regularly edging out Hannity, with an audience of about 2.4 million on any given night, compared with the 2.2 or so that tune into Hannity. So who are these guys?

Well, Sean Hannity is Rush Limbaugh’s protege (for a long time now he has had the #2 syndicated talk radio show in the country) and was for years the co-host and senior partner in Fox’s Hannity and Colmes “debate” show. He’s loud and bombastic, like Limbaugh, and also like Limbaugh and O’Reily he is highly partisan. Yes, all of these guys are Republicans, but Hannity (at least on his television show) goes out of his way to try to push, and often get in front of, the GOP party line. For instance, Hannity was one of the first guys to tie Obama to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. These guys worship at the alter of Reagan and are largely GOP partisan hacks.

Glenn Beck, however, strikes me as a little different. Yes, Beck loves Reagan and believes that all Democrats are socialists, just like the rest of them. What sets Beck apart, however, is that Beck isn’t nearly as intelligent as they are. While Hannity and O’Reily, at least on television, seem to understand that there are limits to what they can say without getting into trouble and causing a backlash against their own movement, Beck is willing to just let it all hang out there. Beck doesn’t insinuate that liberals are stupid, or that that America would be better off if bin Laden would attack us to make plain the weaknesses that the liberals have exposed by respecting civil rights, or that Obama is a racist who hates white people and “white culture”. Beck has actually said all of those things. (Here, here, and here if you want to see the respective videos.)

Ratings are up for all of these guys, which isn’t really surprising: conservatives are worried about what Obama and the Democrats are doing, and there is some kind of perverse comfort to watch people on television express the same views that you are. But Beck is growing even faster than the rest of them, especially when you consider that he is sitting at the 5pm time slot and doesn’t have nearly the same name recognition as Sean Hannity. But it’s not like he’s any more charismatic than Hannity, nor does he have a drastically different format, nor is he particularly good looking. So what’s so special about Glenn Beck?

I can think of two possible answers. It might be that Beck attracts more of the “what will he say next?” crowd. After all, a significant fraction of the viewers of all of these shows don’t really agree with the rantings of the host, but they watch them for the same reasons that people slow down to look at accidents on the freeway. It’s possible that because Beck lacks what little filter between brain and mouth that Hannity that he gets more gawkers. I hope that’s the case, because the other possibility is a little more disturbing.

After all, the other possibility is that Beck appeals to a group of people for whom Sean Hannity is too moderate. I periodically read the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which outlines the latest trends in racial hatred in America. I noticed on their website that there has been a dramatic uptick over the last few years in the number of hate groups in the United States, and from there I checked on the status of the Council of Conservative Citizens–a white supremacist organization that can count among its members (and former members) quite a few conservative spokesman and politicians. And sure enough, on the front page of the CCC’s website, stuck between a poll asking whether blacks were mistreated under Jim Crow (the vast majority of respondents thought “no”) and an article on the brutal murder of a white girl by a black man, were a number of Glenn Beck videos.

I’m afraid that there is a growing number of Americans who feel threatened; threatened by our black president, threatened by the growing percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic, threatened by the global economic marketplace. You throw in one of the worst and most prolonged economic recessions in many years, and you get a lot of people who are quite upset and mistrustful of anyone who looks, sounds, or acts different than they do.

And Glenn Beck is rising as their champion. In particular, his reference on Monday to Obama hating “white culture” I thought was telling. It’s an absurd statement: I’m not even sure what the “white culture” even is, much less why a man raised by a white mother and a white grandmother and who has lived most of his adult life in white suburban neighborhoods would hate it. And yet I think Beck is consciously referencing white supremacists who have classically tried to justify anti-miscegenation laws by upholding “white culture” or “white America” as somehow different or better than so-called “black” culture. It’s no coincidence that if you Google for “white culture”, you are confronted with a list of hate groups and articles about hate groups–besides Glenn Beck, that is.

Moreover, I can’t help but thinking that this kind of racial animosity is only going to get worse over the next ten, twenty, or even thirty years. I’m afraid that a lot of people contended themselves with the post-Jim Crow, racially diverse world we live in by consoling themselves that at least blacks, and more recently Hispanics, were a politically week minority. Well, soon whites will be relegated to the status of a plurality, instead of a majority, and blacks and Hispanics are finally asserting their political authority–as evidenced by our first black president and our soon to be first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. As those fears grow so will the ratings of people like Glenn Beck–or the next generation of radio talk show hosts who are even more explicit in their race-baiting than he is. But I’m afraid that we will also see a dramatic uptick in racial violence and the spread of racially-motivated hate groups.

So maybe Glenn Beck is just an aberration–I certainly hope that he is. But I’m afraid that he’s the harbinger of a wave of racial animosity and even violence like we haven’t seen since the 1950s.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Racism, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.