It May Take 27 Years To Undo The Damage Beck Caused In 27 Months
April 08, 2011 4:39 am ET by Will Bunch
snip//
The crazier that Beck got, the more viewers and advertisers he drove away, until eventually it was too much for his beleaguered bosses at FNC, who may have lost as much as $40 million on the whole fiasco. Liberals, especially those who organized a high successful advertiser boycott of Beck's program, celebrated the news as a victory against political hate speech.
But I think that progressives might want to hold off on that victory lap -- unless it's to get in better shape for the long battle ahead.
Because
the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."
You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window-- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.Ironically, no one mastered the use of the Overton Window better than Beck. With all the focus on the leading edge of Beck's craziness -- the "caliphate" stuff, the flirtation with "the FEMA camps," or President Obama's "deep-seated hatred" of white people --
it's easy to forget how he rationalized once out-there ideas to millions of American conservatives, and how those ideas became ingrained in the Republican agenda that has thwarted progressivism from virtually the day Obama took office.more...
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201104080002