Glenn Beck is never surprising. But he is, from time to time, a good object lesson.
There’s a great temptation among journalists that is, I find, very rarely spoken of. It’s one they share with politicians, celebrities and the rich. It’s the temptation to bully.
Like the rich, the famous and the political, journalists have a certain sort of power. Unlike the other groups, it’s not entirely theirs, but they do have access to it. It’s the power to hurt.
You see it every once in a while when you read a column by a journalist about her phone bill. She gets charged for something she doesn’t think she should have been charged for, gets the usual runaround from the usual companies, but is able, unusually, to tell thousands of people about it, to shame the company publically in a way that, even with all our vaunted access to the world through social media, the rest of the world still can’t really do (unless, perhaps, they’re the first to write a catchy tune about it).
As I say, it peeks out only rarely, but you can bet that it happens a little less rarely behind the scenes, with journalists, confronted with one of life’s daily commercial frustrations, telling their customer service representative, their store manager or their waiter that they write for the Toronto Star or the Boston Globe and surely they wouldn’t want to be forced to mention this in print, in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Surely.
On Wednesday, Glenn Beck went on a rather long rant on his radio show for the second time about a flight attendant on American Airlines whom he thought treated him peremptorily. I don’t expect he had to do the bullying-in-private that many journalists are at least occasionally reduced to, because he’s facially famous. In fact, that was the source of his complaint, that the liberal flight attendant served him poorly because he was conservative Glenn Beck.
As I said, it’s no surprise Glenn Beck is a bully, but this incident does serve to highlight one of the more venal misuses of journalism. Journalists who have made enough of a name for themselves that they’re given space to talk about themselves and the kind of day they’ve had have been given a lot of power. It usually can’t bring down statesmen (unless the journalist is very good and very lucky), but it can, quite effectively, derail an average person’s career.
It’s no different from and no less heinous than the use of any power for personal reasons. It’s something journalists — and I presume Beck is one by some definition or other — have to be very careful of, whether in print, or sitting in an aisle seat and fuming about the service.
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Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @bertarcher.
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