ALTHOUGH BECK IS MORE LIKELY TO FAKE IT:

Stephen Colbert on ‘Network’: Great Film or the Greatest Film? (DAVE ITZKOFF, 5/19/11, NY Times)

Q. [W]hat do you think “Network” got right, in terms of predicting the present-day media landscape?

A. “I will tell you what to think.” That’s what it prefigures most of all. “I will tell you what to think, and how to feel.” [Beale is] doing it in a quasi-benevolent way, which is, I’m going to remind you that you’re being anesthetized right now. That’s what they get right, in terms of what you see on TV. That is a great bulk of what happens with news now. And not just the nighttime people that I’m sort of a parody of, not just the opinion-making people, but even what is left of straight news. Howard Beale is a precursor of people who are telling you how you feel. That’s what they get right. [...]

Q. Did “Network” in any way inspire the creation of “The Colbert Report”?

A. It’s not an influence for my show, because Beale is a hopeless character who ultimately does not succeed in what he wants to do, and is killed. He’s not a messianic figure. When Glenn Beck started, I listened to Glenn on the radio for years. I thought, this guy’s got something here, but he’s not quite focused. He’s always arguing both sides towards the middle, the fill-airtime behavior that you hear a lot on talk radio. And then he got his [television] show and he had to focus and do a single hour, and I thought, he’s really got his game now. He’s got one thing and he’s going to ride that pony till it’s dead, then he’s going to the next pony. But always riding in the same direction. And then I read in an article that he was a big fan of Howard Beale. He’s modeling himself on Howard Beale.

Q. Really?

A. It was in The New York Times. You should read that paper sometime. He talks about how he was modeling himself on Howard Beale, but also on Jesus and Gandhi. And I thought, Wow, none of those stories end well.

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