Howard Beale's Epic Rant

Sometimes I wish Howard Beale were real. I'm going to introduce you to him regardless, dear reader, even if he's a fictional character from a 1976 movie called "Network". Why? Because this character, and this movie, is a perfect representation of the post-truth society we live in today. The film describes how "The News" is being driven by viewer ratings rather than facts or truth, an Howard Beale is the resulting madness incarnate.

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everyone knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work, or scared of losing their job... The Dollar buys a nickle'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 that knows what to do and there's no end to it. - Howard Beale

In the film, Howard Beale is a longtime anchor of the Union Broadcasting System's UBS Evening News in New York City, who early on in the story gets notified by his boss that he will be cancelled in two weeks due to declining ratings. The evening news just isn't popular anymore, so Howard will be taken off the air. After hearing this depressing news, Beale announces during next evening's life broadcast that he will commit suicide on air next week. The network, UBS, wants to fire him immediately of course, but Beale's supervisor manages to keep him on if he promises to publicly apologize on air the next day. Beale breaks his promise though, and launches into another rant about the meaningless of life the next evening. And then a miracle happens; Beale's outburst causes the newscast's ratings to spike.

In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading his viewers to shout out of their windows "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Soon afterward, Beale is hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves". Ultimately, the show becomes the most highly rated program on television, and Beale finds new celebrity preaching his angry message in front of a live studio audience that, on cue, chants Beale's signature catchphrase en masse: "We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore."
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The above linked video is that famous scene where Beale moves the nation to stand up and shout out of their windows that they're not going to take it anymore; this is just one of Howard's epic rants. In his own Howard Beale Show he preaches all the time, but one particular rant was a mistake;

When Beale discovers that Communications Corporation of America (CCA), the conglomerate that owns UBS, will be bought out by an even larger Saudi Arabian conglomerate, he launches an on-screen tirade against the deal and urges viewers to pressure the White House to stop it. This panics the top network brass because UBS's debt load has made the merger essential for its survival.
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He succeeds in stopping the deal, but that earns him the ire of the CEO of the mother corporation. Beale is then invited to meet with this CEO, brilliantly played by Ned Beatty, and is now on the receiving end of an epic rant. Beale is told that by trying to stop the deal with the Saudi Arabian conglomerate, he has "meddled with the forces of nature", that the world is a business, a collection of corporations manned by workers instead of a collection of nations populated by people. Watch that scene linked below: it's brilliant and is so strikingly close to our economically globalized reality. If you haven't seen this film yet, do yourself a favor and watch it if you have the chance. We live in a world with unprecedented access to information, unlike mr. Beale who lived in the pre-internet age. Yet with all this information at our fingertips we still find ourself in a world where truth and factual information seem hard to get, we still live in a post-truth world where honest information still does not sell, and we still live in the world so brilliantly described in the below linked scene, a world of corporations rather than nations or democracies.

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