Glenn Beck Is Not the Only One Having a Media Identity Crisis at SXSW
AUSTIN, TEXAS-So, what the hell is Glenn Beck doing at a South By Southwest a day party? On a muggy Friday afternoon, the former Fox News blowhard appeared at a Nat Geo party at a bar on Sixth Street in his fedora, cuffed jeans, and navy blue cardigan. This was the same ensemble that you've probably seen mocked online; the visual manifestation of Glenn Beck 2.0. Reformed Glenn Beck. Woke Glenn Beck. He's not who he was, he wants you to know, except when it comes to his beliefs, he also wants you to know. It was the first of many media identity crises present on the first day of the sprawling festival. This part of the week is known for being comically stocked with Silicon Valley buzz words, namely innovation. But the 2017 incarnation-on its first day, anyway-felt stubbornly stuck in the gloomy present.
"I would not wish celebrity or fame on my worst enemy," Beck told the journalist Peter Kafka during a live taping of Kafka's ReCode Media podcast. (He ditched the fedora before taking the stage to minimal applause.) Beck, one of Jon Stewart's longtime conservative adversaries, bragged that he had a soul-searching phone call with Samantha Bee earlier that day, something that would have seemed impossible eight years ago. He had spent part of his Friday morning radio broadcast publicly defending Bee against the backlash of a recent CPAC bit gone awry, during which a man with an allegedly alt-right undercut turned out to be a cancer patient. (While recounting the story, Beck pointed to a male audience member and casually called out the man's own "Nazi haircut.") On at least two separate occasions, Beck discussed the concept of "having balls," and at one point used the phrase "grow a sack."
Beck's whole thing these days is some fantasy version of post-partisan news. "Right is right, wrong is wrong," he told Kafka. Beck favors these simple platitudes. He spoke about deep self-reflection after being "thrown up against the wall" and feeling forced to question his own beliefs. But cardigan be damned, he's still a conservative. "I haven't changed anything except my tone," Beck said beneath the same shit-eating grin that used to beam through Fox News airwaves for a nightly hour of unscripted spew. For the first time in his decades-long career, he claims not to know who his audience is, but he believes it consists of people who are "so sick and tired of politics." In Dallas, he runs The Blaze, whose biggest star, Tomi Lahren, has gone viral several times over for her own "right is right"-style monologues. The problem is that most of these, like Lahren's anti-Colin Kaepernick rant, contain undertones more akin to "white is right." Nevertheless, Beck denies having influenced the work of Alex Jones or Steve Bannon's Breitbart.
"I thought Andrew Breitbart was a very smart guy, a rebel," Beck said, adding that the two didn't see "eye to eye" on a few things. He's among the chorus of voices claiming that, were Breitbart (the man) alive today, he would not support Steve Bannon's white supremacy vision. (Ex-Breitbart bigwig Ben Shapiro shares this sentiment.) "Andrew believed what he believed," Beck said solemnly.
Beck's whole thing these days is some fantasy version of post-partisan news.
Later on Friday afternoon, the film portion of the festival kicked off with Nobody Speak, a forthcoming Netflix documentary about freedom of the press, or lack thereof. The film centers around the Hulk Hogan sex tape trial that brought down Gawker. It's a tick-tock of the court proceedings featuring interviews with principal players (Gawker founder Nick Denton, editors A.J. Daulerio and John Cook, Hulk's lawyer Charles Harder) and third party perspectives from media talking heads (David Folkenflik, Jay Rosen, Margaret Sullivan, the late David Carr). You see Daulerio filled with anxiety and uncertainty in his Florida apartment and you see Hogan stride into court in his black business bandana.
It's easy to fall for the journalism chest-thumping when the issues are discussed at the macro level, or when the film points to other, more meaningful Gawker exposé subjects like Guccifer, Manti Te'o, or Rob Ford. "I wanted to write true things about bad people," editor John Cook declares. "The world is mean sometimes," Denton deadpans. A little less convincing is Denton's justification (and facial expression) for publishing the Hogan sex tape in the first place. Yet as soon as the Peter Thiel plot twist is revealed (Thiel secretly funded Hogan's case as a long-play to bankrupt the company; it worked) seemingly everyone agrees that billionaires bending the Constitution is a resolutely bad thing. What's missing is a legitimate argument or 10,000-foot view for why the sex tape itself, and not the act of publishing it, mattered.
The film devotes its third act to another tick-tock: how the Las Vegas Review-Journal's disillusioned staff used shoe-leather reporting to figure out the identity of their new owner, Sheldon Adelson. It's pleasurable to watch all these old-school, saggy-khakis newspaper people do their thing and seek righteous justice; less pleasurable to see all the main players gone from the paper after the fact (it's unclear how many of them are currently employed).
Though the film premiered at Sundance, director Brian Knappenberger told the SXSW screening audience that he had just finished re-cutting it earlier in the week to reflect the current state of media. So there are plenty of flashbacks to press beatdowns during Trump rallies, plus Sean Spicer lying about inauguration crowd size during his first White House press conference and Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" moment. In a line that could sum up the whole film, President Trump says, "The leaks are real, the news is fake." The project nobly attempts to end on an optimistic note, and nostalgic images of The Washington Post team breaking Watergate underscore a war cry for speaking truth to power.
As evening approached, the entire feel of the festival shifted from the media's bleak life-questioning during the day to boisterous, more optimistic brand parties at night. Watergate's Carl Bernstein posed for selfies at CNN's opening night party while two of the network's personalities, Jake Tapper and Van Jones, milled about like movie stars. Newly acquired YouTube sensation Casey Neistat posted up on a railing, shades pushed back on his hair, while CNN head honcho Jeff Zucker held court in a corner of the back porch, at one point standing up to greet celebrity chef Jose Andres. Across town, the "failing" New York Times held a rival party to spotlight its magazine: free drinks, live hip-hop concert, zero evidence of the company feeling dismayed by the almost daily attacks of the President of the United States.
So sure, the media may be having a mini identity crisis at the moment, but at least it knows that.
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