[via: J. Luzader (Twitter)]

Mr. Beck,

I would like to confront you about something. I watch your show every chance I get, because you have such a large audience, and I like to see what popular opinion is being shaped by. I must tell you, when I watch your show, I am nearly always shocked. I watch you lay out intricate conspiracy theories (minimum wage increase is a scheme to force young people into joining AmeriCorps) meant to scare people into “waking up” (as your phrase goes), set up false dichotomies: (I paraphrase here for the sake of lucidity) either you are for an even playing field which amounts to no responsibility, socialism and slavery, or you are for accepting consequences, hard work, effort, self-reliance, and honesty. I see you make radical and unsubstantiated claims and follow them with things like “wake up people, don’t you see what’s going on,” a scare tactic and derisive in-crowd technique. Essentially saying, “If you don’t agree with me, you are not ‘awake,’ not in the know, and, obviously, do not see what is going… oh, are you going to get it so hard when everything falls apart.”

These claims are often quite incendiary in content, but they are not in and of themselves what is most unsettling about your show, nor is it the fact that you often make these claims often with nothing backing up them up except for your gut and statements like “and, I really do believe this.” No, the worst part about what you do, and I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I cannot help but think you must be aware of this fact, is that everything you say, every “opinion” that you offer on air, is being broadcast under the moniker of NEWS. Your channel is Fox News. News. When one hears the word “news” what associations does the mind automatically make? Facts, events, and truths about the world around one, the facts about existence from which one must synthesize one’s word view. When you say things like, “Look people, all of Obama’s policies, this entire health care debate, it boils down to one thing, and that’s Obama’s view on reparations,” you are saying it from a platform that has a high level of intrinsic trust from the public, trust that was built by years and years of real journalism and real journalists. You are high jacking the trustworthy reputations that many of those journalists earned to add implicit credence to your own opinions. The end result of all this is that people are less likely to question what you tell them. They are not as likely to realize that in the previous statement you managed to tacitly suggest that if one agrees with healthcare, one must be in favor of reparations, as it is the central issue in Obama’s platform (again, false dichotomy: “either you disagree with healthcare or you’re for reparations”), or to recognize your ad hominem attack, “Obama is a racist: ignore his opinions.” (Putting the fact aside that Obama is very likely not a racist) strictly speaking, the autonomous logical validity of a certain statement or argument is not affected by the views, personality etc. of the people who accept the statement or argument. It is this fact, Mr. Beck, which has caused me to write you this letter. I respect your right to free speech; I do. I believe you should be able to say whatever you want, whenever. However, I believe it to be fundamentally dishonest to sit in a place of authority, and you are in a place of authority, and tell people what your gut says, and ignore the fact that what you are saying is taken on faith more often than it ought to be because it is perceived to be news, to ignore the fact that your gut gets taken as news. This is equivocation a massive scale. Opinion to news. You may not be doing it on purpose, you may not even be aware of this fact, but I hope that if you ever read this letter it raises you consciousness and you realize the duty to the truth that your viewers assume you abide by and how vast the gap is between the verifiable truth, and what you put out over the airways to be accepted as truth.

Sincerely,
J. Luzader