A couple of months ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover piece by Mark Leibovich on Fox News's wackiest windbag, Glenn Beck. For me, the most surprising revelation in the lengthy profile (which I admit to reading with nostrils pinched firmly between thumb and forefinger) was that Beck is a big fan of Orson Welles. It seems that Beck keeps a picture of Welles on his office wall and named his own production company, Mercury Radio Arts, after Welles's famed Mercury Theatre.
Has no one informed Beck that Welles was (gasp!) a lifelong progressive, the political species Beck claims to despise most? That Welles considered running for office as a New Deal Democrat? That among the likely reasons for his self-imposed European exile was (as Joseph McBride has persuasively argued*) to escape the blacklist and the anti-leftist witch hunts?
Apparently, Beck's admiration for Welles stems from his youthful exposure to a recording of the latter's notorious 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast—a radio play (based on the H. G. Wells novel about Martian invaders) that managed, unintentionally, to panic thousands of listeners who mistook its fake news flashes for the real thing. Gee . . . concocting fiction disguised as news that scares people—that's a pretty good description of what Beck does, so I guess it's no wonder he was impressed.
I'm reminded of the moment in Citizen Kane's famous breakfast scene when Kane's first wife says, "Really, Charles, people will think . . ." and Kane finishes her sentence with an emphatic ". . . what I tell them to think!" That exchange was part of Welles's withering indictment of an arrogant media mogul's sense of entitlement and readiness to abuse his power. I suspect that Beck, if he ever saw Kane, thinks of those words as simply a sound professional axiom.
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* See McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006).
