“I don’t have to tell you things are bad,” Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) announces in the warm-up to his famed populist outburst in Network (1976), inciting his millions of viewers to rush to their living room windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Beale ticks off a standard litany of 1970s-era social woes—inflation, unemployment, bank failures, violent crime—to stoke the audience of his nightly news broadcast. In the end, his undoing proves to be not hubris but civics. He tries to goad Americans into thinking critically about the ultimate source of their malaise: the economic arrangement of their daily affairs. Beale first denounces, and then embraces, the global market system, all to the detriment of his new calling as the “mad prophet of the airwaves.” Americans, it turns out, don’t want to be bothered with detailed jeremiads about the relative social costs of market sovereignty, and how effective social remedies may require a re-examination of the Republic’s guiding folklore of the free market. As Beale’s ratings tank, his bosses script a violent end for him—an on-air assassination carried out by an outfit called the Ecumenical Liberation Army. With Beale out of the picture, the network can pad its prime-time schedule with lesser, more lurid tabloid knockoffs of his doomsaying style.
