Megan Doherty, a history Ph.D student at Columbia University, recently spent two hours giving Glenn Beck and his staff a history tour of New York City. She tells her story in the Huffington Post. Doherty concludes that Beck is not a John Bircher or a conservative remnant from the Cold War, but is best described as a “confidence man.”
Whether or not you buy Doherty’s description of Beck as a confidence man, the article, especially her stories about escorting Beck through the city, is worth reading.
My “radical” embrace of narrative garnered his approval. “You've understood the key thing the public wants,” he commended me on-to-one between stops: “The public don't want facts and figures. They want to be entertained. That's what it's all about. This is entertainment.”
She built a whole hatchet job around that? Seems to me he was saying that she and he do the same thing, in a good way.
My cousin-in-law, who worked with Beck when he was a disc jockey in Connecticut, said much the same thing. He's been an entertainer the entire time. The only difference between him and Jon Stewart is that Stewart appears to believe what he says both on and off camera. Folks who have worked with Beck have often said his on-air persona was exactly (and perhaps only) that–a persona. Not much of a surprise, but satisfying nevertheless, to find him admitting as much to her in NYC.