Paul Harris: Glenn Beck and the Echoes of Charles Coughlin
[Paul Harris is a US correspondent for the Guardian and Observer.]
His radio show drew millions of listeners. His global conspiracy theories outraged some, but drew many others to his paranoid rantings. He dubbed the American president a communist sympathiser and supported a grassroots conservative political movement aimed at overthrowing two-party politics. He made statements that horrified Jewish groups.
This is Glenn Beck, right?
It certainly sounds like the controversial Fox News star. After all, he lambasts Barack Obama as a dangerous Marxist; his pronouncements on Nazis have caused a coalition of 400 rabbis to advertise against him in the Wall Street Journal; and his penchant for anti-America conspiracy theories on everything from Fema to George Soros knows no bounds.
But it is not Beck. It is, in fact, a description of Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous rightwing "radio priest", whose broadcasts in the 1930s disturbingly echo those of Beck today. Indeed, some experts see Coughlin as a father figure to the extremist broadcasting Beck has honed so well. Many commentators on the left, including in Harper's Magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review, have drawn a parallel between our own troubled times with Beck and the tumultuous 1930s that saw the rise of fascism and Coughlin.
You can see their point. Coughlin, a small-time Roman Catholic priest from Michigan whose radio show turned him into a national power-player, developed a mass audience estimated to have been 40 million-strong at its peak. His church opened its own post office to cope with fanmail. Coughlin used demagoguery to promote his views, which blended the extremes of left and right into a sort of conservative populism....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
His radio show drew millions of listeners. His global conspiracy theories outraged some, but drew many others to his paranoid rantings. He dubbed the American president a communist sympathiser and supported a grassroots conservative political movement aimed at overthrowing two-party politics. He made statements that horrified Jewish groups.
This is Glenn Beck, right?
It certainly sounds like the controversial Fox News star. After all, he lambasts Barack Obama as a dangerous Marxist; his pronouncements on Nazis have caused a coalition of 400 rabbis to advertise against him in the Wall Street Journal; and his penchant for anti-America conspiracy theories on everything from Fema to George Soros knows no bounds.
But it is not Beck. It is, in fact, a description of Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous rightwing "radio priest", whose broadcasts in the 1930s disturbingly echo those of Beck today. Indeed, some experts see Coughlin as a father figure to the extremist broadcasting Beck has honed so well. Many commentators on the left, including in Harper's Magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review, have drawn a parallel between our own troubled times with Beck and the tumultuous 1930s that saw the rise of fascism and Coughlin.
You can see their point. Coughlin, a small-time Roman Catholic priest from Michigan whose radio show turned him into a national power-player, developed a mass audience estimated to have been 40 million-strong at its peak. His church opened its own post office to cope with fanmail. Coughlin used demagoguery to promote his views, which blended the extremes of left and right into a sort of conservative populism....