If you've ever seen the 1976 movie Network, you'll know the unforgettable scene in which TV news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) has a mental breakdown while on-air.
Ignoring the teleprompter, he breaks into one of the greatest soliloquies of American cinema, a wandering but coherent rant about the banks, crime and unemployment.
Finally, he urges his viewers to throw open their windows and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!"
Today, Network feels as fresh and vital as it did 36 years ago, and not just because Finch, Faye Dunaway and Beatrice Straight won Oscars for acting in it.
It's because the movie predicts everything about modern media in the 21st Century—from reality TV and YouTube to Glenn Beck and the tabloid news format. And it did so 20 years before the internet even existed.
It's spooky how much the movie got right about the direction of the news business specifically, and the media generally.
If you haven't seen the movie, take this opportunity to see the famous 'mad as hell!' speech
Note that the script, written during the mid-1970s recession, could describe 2012 with hardly any changes:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!
If Beale's speech feels familiar, that's because it is: Glenn Beck borrowed his entire paranoid persona from Beale.
When Beck's advertisers deserted his show after he made increasingly intemperate remarks—he called President Obama a racist at one point—the network kept him on because his verging-on-crazy personality gained a huge following.
'Network' predicted the rise of Tabloid TV.
In the movie, Beale's "mad as hell" rant becomes an instant hit with audiences, and his network, UBS, gives him his own tabloid TV show, grabbing even bigger ratings.
But tabloid TV wasn't invented until the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before then, TV news even at the local level was a sober affair. Across the board, it looked the way PBS Newshour looks now: Anchors read their scripts, unadorned with captions or graphics, and reported footage was given extended airtime. Not everything was "Live!" "Local!" and "Late-breaking!"
Tabloid TV was invented in 1989 by Joel Cheatwood, then a news producer at Miami's WSVN. Cheatwood is now Glenn Beck's producer.
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