OPINION
79
Beck's Silent Red Phone Is 'a Hotline to Nowhere'
Host's willful nonsense is the 'new ignorance'
By Rob Quinn
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Posted Nov 4, 09 6:01 AM CST
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(Newser)
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Glenn Beck likes to say that the red phone on his desk is a direct line to the White House, but of course it's a hotline to nowhere, just like the Fox host's whole schtick. Beck complains piteously that White House libbers won't call to respond to his issues, Thomas Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal. But he doesn't want information. "That's what makes Mr. Beck's pantomime fear and trembling so odious: He doesn't appear to be interested in further evidence, or really any evidence that doesn't serve his shtick."
Frank went through the motions of speaking to some of Beck's recent targets and—surprise, surprise—not one of them received the hotline number. The silent phone symbolizes "a new kind of ignorance," Frank concludes, an age when people can dismiss what they don't like as liberal bias, surround themselves with media only serving up opinions they like, and "demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself."