Beck did this to box-in the left-wing media. They must either admit a crowd size of 400,000+ or downgrade the historic MLK speech.

I just heard Glenn Beck on a Fox News Sunday podcast this week.

 

This guy has a pretty good take on where things are going.

 

I had been hearing his name a lot but I don't get cable so I haven't heard him.

The raising of the memory of Martin Luther King is probably appropriate in a sense. As I understand it, King borrowed from Mohandas Ghandi's use of civil disobedience. And of course, Ghandi seems to have implemented strategies he synthesized together from various sources but mainly from the ideas of Count Tolstoy with whom Ghandi had apparently corresponded.

 

There may be a need to dust off this form of bringing about change soon.

Back in the 1950's through 1970's a handful of executives controlled the vast majority of US media. They livid and worked within a couple square miles of each other. They got up, read the New York Times, and then decided what the country would read, see and hear for the rest of the day.    

 

I remember back in the 1960's that there was still a minor uproar, a sense of affront in the mainstream news organizations, that William F. Buckley's National Review even existed. It was equated with publications from the likes of The John Birch Society.

 

The Kennedy administration saw the nascent rise of conservative radio programs and promulgated the "fairness doctrine" specifically to eliminate them. This worked to muzzle talk radio for twenty years until it was overturned in the courts. I heard nary a peep of protest from ABC, CBS or NBC.

 

When cable began proliferating, Christian television networks began reaching significant market shares. There were howls of outrage from mainstream media. They deeply resented losing their monopoly. 

 

There are new howls of each time somebody carves out another chunk of their once inviolable monopoly. It's part ideological, because they cannot stand any explanatory narrative than their own. It's also part financial. Somebody is taking their advertising dollars. 

 

 

It doesn't matter whether it's Fox News, Sarah Palin or Glen Beck. Outsiders are taking away their control of the narrative, the historical context of news. They can only howl their outrage, they are losing control, and they know it. .