Glenn Beck's Hotline to Nowhere

Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his
desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute
frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark
pleading-puppy look.

What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants
to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he
says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck
gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to
correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call."

One of the specific answers Mr. Beck
wanted, on one of the days I watched his program last week, had to do
with White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has been
caught on film quoting one of those Mao Zedong aphorisms that wouldn't
look out of place on a motivational poster. She also remarked that Mao
was one of her "favorite political philosophers," an honor the Chinese
Communist shared with Mother Teresa.

Obviously Ms. Dunn was yet another
person who deserved to be added to the long list of radicals that Mr.
Beck had uncovered within the government.

What's more, no one would call that red phone to reassure Mr. Beck,
to tell him that the Obama administration isn't crawling with traitors
or to explain why his many nightmare scenarios will not actually come
to pass.

"They
won't call me," he tells the camera. "Communists, revolutionaries,
socialists, Marxists, followers of Chairman Mao appointed by Obama to
the executive branch in positions of the government-call, call me.
Explain it. Explain it any other way. Call me, right now."

Yet there the mute telephone sits, a quiet symbol of Middle
America's frustration. The diabolical liberals in the White House
refuse even to acknowledge our queries. "Their silence is their
answer," the host sighs.

Is it really? On Monday I wrote to an old friend, Robert McChesney,
a professor of communications at the University of Illinois who has
been a frequent target of Mr. Beck in recent weeks for his left-wing
views and also for co-founding Free Press, an advocacy group on media
policy. Did Mr. McChesney get a chance to respond on the red phone or
any other way? No. "He never asked me or Free Press to call the red
phone," Mr. McChesney wrote me.

Then I emailed Mark Lloyd, the Chief Diversity Officer at the
Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Beck has attacked Mr. Lloyd
numerous times in recent weeks, repeatedly airing video clips in which
he appears to hold noxious views. Did Mr. Lloyd get a chance to call
the red phone? "No, no one gave me a phone number to call Beck."

Nor should Mr. Beck require a phone call from the White House to
understand that lots of people, including conservatives, have cited Mao
and Lenin and other such demonic figures in all sorts of contexts, and
that they aren't always careful, when so citing, to point out what bad
people these were.

No discerning person would conclude from Ms. Dunn's dimwitted remark
that she is a Maoist. That would require more evidence-and that's what
makes Mr. Beck's pantomime fear and trembling so odious: He doesn't
appear to be interested in further evidence, or really any evidence
that doesn't serve his shtick.

Consider a few of the other grand assertions tossed out by the
panic-peddling host last week: that the cause of last year's financial
crisis was pressure exerted by Acorn and "the people in Washington" on
otherwise-reluctant mortgage lenders; that the cause of the inflation
of the 1970s was President Jimmy Carter's quest for a "socialist
utopia."

These are postulates that it is only possible to believe after you
have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after
you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on
these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose
ideological fairy tales over reality until the day a magical phone call
comes from on high.

What Mr. Beck's silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of
ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to
blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall
themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what
displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be
transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Why not let Mr. Beck and his viewers have their fun? Because ideas
have consequences. Maybe, as many believe, Glenn Beck is indeed the
future of the conservative movement. From tea parties to town-hall
meetings, thousands are signing up and fitting themselves out with
their very own hotline to nowhere.