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  • Review Essay:Glenn Beck and the Politics of Affect
  • Tim Raphael (bio)

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From his Fox News debut the day before Obama's inauguration through his departure on June 30, 2011, Glenn Beck was arguably the most influential political personality on television. Within a month of its premiere, Glenn Beck (Fox, 2009-2011) was a phenomenon, doubling the time slot's viewership and generating new media buzz and ad revenues for a network whose ratings and influence had been declining in tandem with the Bush administration. Overnight, the show catalyzed Fox News's reincarnation as the electronic heart of resistance to the Obama presidency and made Beck the avatar of the vitriolic and weeping Right.

Two new biographies of Beck, by journalists Dana Milbank and Alexander Zaitchik, weigh in on the Beck phenomenon. Although much [End Page 209] of what has previously been written about Beck has focused on the long shadow he cast in his brief stint at Fox News, Milbank widens the lens to situate Beck within the paranoid-style tradition of American politics first identified by historian Richard Hofstadter. Milbank details Beck's use of his radio and television platforms to trumpet vast left-wing conspiracies and doomsday scenarios, his staging of frequent tours and rallies to whip up the faithful, and his best-selling books that generated logically incoherent but affectively potent scenarios for dramatizing the political and moral struggle between good and evil. Characterizing Beck as a carnival barker with a megaphone, Milbank documents Beck's "factional" narrative strategies that employed "plots rooted in fact" to generate "completely fictional" accounts of history and current events.1 Whether describing Beck hyperkinetically lurching back and forth between chalkboard and map to document impending ruin on the Glenn Beck show or strolling onto the Fox and Friends (Fox News, 1998-) set to infamously declare that Barack Obama was "a guy who has a deep seated hatred for white people," Milbank paints Beck as the paranoid id of the American Right, the unconstrained articulator of the rage that dare not speak its name.2

Zaitchik convincingly identifies the 1980s morning-zoo revolution as the key to understanding Beck's performance persona and influence.3 Assessing Beck's media career as a continuum, with roots in the performance practices of the 1980s Top 40 radio shock and schlock jocks who ushered in the morning-zoo format, Zaitchik outlines how the cocaine-fueled, high-energy, hyperemotive persona of the morning-zoo DJ formed the embryonic hub of national talk-radio networks built around personalities like Beck and Rush Limbaugh that rose to prominence out of the deregulation and syndication frenzy of the Reagan-Bush years. Zaitchik traces Beck's development from Top 40 DJ to "radio superpatriot" to Fox News's most marketable asset by paying attention to how Beck made his own political awakening the lightning rod for channeling the electrical energy of a brewing political storm into a tsunami wave of politics-as-personal-testimonial that crested with the formation of the Tea Party.

Although both books make valuable contributions to understanding Beck's popularity and political significance, they are also reminders of how unfortunate it is that there is so little good scholarly research on conservative media. Beck is a product of the inextricable link between the rise of neoliberal politics and right-wing media in the United States. Over the past four decades, conservative communications and media professionals have changed the way the political game is played by exploiting new structures of media production and dissemination, deregulation, and the rise of Internet technologies and social networks to develop syndicated media franchises, Fox News, and a powerful web presence. Their political clout is such that before serious Republican candidates could be considered for the presidency in 2012, they first had to pass muster with Fox News president Roger Ailes, one of the most influential figures in Republican politics over that forty-year span. That Ailes is merely a bit player in both books points to the vast field of research that remains to be mined by Media Studies [End Page 210] scholars. When Richard Nixon...

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