Month: April 2010

The Things Rupert Murdoch Believes (Courtesy Of Glenn Beck)

Posted by on April 30, 2010 at 12:51 pm. 6 Comments :

The Mad BeckOn yesterday’s episode of Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue, Beck wandered through his usual fairy wonderland of conspiracies against America and himself. He introduced his latest panic alert that he portrayed as a mobster-like scheme to take over the world somehow with carbon emissions trading. It’s a plot so insidious and covert that Beck never actually explained how it worked. He just spent an hour moving around pictures of people he doesn’t like on his blackboard and drawing arrows to the words Crime, Inc.

In the course of this sermon, Beck made an earth shattering admission saying, “I’m not the smartest guy in the world.” And if that wasn’t enough to alter the course of the 21st century, he also disclosed something that reflects more directly on his boss, Rupert Murdoch, and the Fox News network, than anything he’s said previously:

BECK: Who owns this network? Rupert Murdoch. Do you know how much money Rupert Murdoch is … you know he’s got all these things going on. Do you think he’s going to let a guy at five o’clock say a bunch of stuff, put this together, it’s completely wrong, and stay on the network? Do you think he became a billionaire because he’s stupid? No, so that’s not it. Because Fox couldn’t allow me to say things that were wrong.

First of all, let’s disabuse ourselves of the lunacy that Fox doesn’t allow their hosts to say things that are wrong. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re required to contractually. But the astonishing part of Beck’s assertion that whatever he says must be true or Murdoch wouldn’t let him say it, is that it implies an endorsement by Murdoch of EVERYTHING he says.

If Murdoch doesn’t disassociate himself with these remarks, then he cannot possibly claim to be unaligned with Beck’s dementia. He cannot dismiss what Beck says as “just his own opinion.” From now on, the fact that Murdoch continues to employ Beck is Murdoch’s personal certification of, and agreement with, Beck’s crackpottery. It is now officially Murdoch’s crackpottery. So let’s take a look at the some of the things that Murdoch must believe or he would have fired Beck:

  • President Obama is a racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people.
  • It is the eve of destruction in America.
  • The climate cult is teaching your children that the earth is God.
  • The current administration is full of nazis, socialists, communists, Marxists, and Maoists.
  • Katrina victims are scumbags.
  • Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution.
  • The founding of the United States, and the Constitution, were divinely inspired.
  • If your church preaches social justice you must run from it as fast as you can.
  • If we don’t face the truth right now, we’ll be dead in five years; this country can’t survive.
  • The passage of the health care bill marks the end of prosperity in America forever.
  • There are traitors in this government who are deliberately trying to destroy it.
  • The only hope left for America is for Osama Bin Laden to attack again.

Remember, these are things that Murdoch believes because, if he didn’t, he would have taken Beck off the air. And this doesn’t even touch on Murdoch’s beliefs that can be assumed by his not having ditched Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Gretchen Carlson, Dick Morris, Neil Cavuto, and Sarah Palin. And because Murdoch is fully in support of the Insane Clown Posse he employs, it is a reflection on everything his “news” organization produces, including the Wall Street Journal. He is reigning over a diseased media empire that is ravaged with bias and falsehoods. He is the archetypical unscrupulous press baron. Which makes this pronouncement by Beck all the more intriguing:

“I don’t know what happened to our media. What are you, a bunch of cowards? Is that what you are?”

I almost expected Beck to start flapping his arms, make clucking sounds, and dare the media to cross a line that he drew with his foot. In the following sentence, however, Beck confessed that it is he who is afraid – of union thugs, or Obama’s henchmen, who must be lying in wait for him in some dark alley. Beck has a long history of suggesting that his adversaries are plotting his demise. Persecution is just another symptom of his Messianic complex.

But his question is actually a good one, and one I’ve asked many times. It is remarkable to me that the non-Fox media in America permits Fox to be so overtly dishonest and to mercilessly criticize them without bothering to fight back. Clearly they are afraid, but of what? They have as much (more actually) media spectrum as Fox to get a story out. And they have far more viewers and readers in aggregate. For Fox to get away with bullying them is like Pepsi getting stared down by Harley’s Sarsaparilla and Snuff. So I’ll ask the media the same question: What are you, a bunch of cowards?

Sarah Palin And Glenn Beck Tarnish The Time 100

Posted by on April 29, 2010 at 1:31 pm. 6 Comments :

Time Magazine once again brings us their list of the 100 most influential people of the year. And once again they include some sour notes that evoke a tortured combination of laughter and groans. By naming Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as “most influential” Time is courageously cutting against the grain. After all, Palin received the Lie of the Year award from Politifact last year. And Beck was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year. But perhaps the funniest part of this year’s worst honorees is the people selected to honor them.

Sarah Palin, number nine on the list, received an adoring tribute from the Motor City Jackass, Ted Nugent. Palin must be so proud to be praised by the has-been rocker whose last album featured a woman in bondage, on a platter like a pig, with a hand grenade stuck in her mouth. Also, during the last presidential campaign Nugent said this while brandishing a couple of assault weapons:

Nugent: I was in Chicago last week I said, “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk?” Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch.” Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.

Ted Nugent was obviously the best qualified person to represent the political philosophy of Palin, especially her commitment to equal rights and respect for women. In his commentary he even had the guts to praise Palin for her “herculean work ethic,” by which he must mean her decision to quit halfway through the gubernatorial post to which she was elected so that she could stuff her pockets full of cash.

Glenn Beck got an even more fitting tribute from an even bigger jackass – Sarah Palin. Beck was lauded by Palin as a “history buff,” and “America’s professor of common sense.” That’s mighty high praise coming from someone who couldn’t cite a single magazine that she read, and who thinks that the Constitution gives the vice-president authority over the Senate.

“Glenn’s like the high school government teacher so many wish they’d had, charting and connecting ideas with chalk-dusted fingers – kicking it old school – instead of becoming just another talking-heads show host.”

Excuse me, Sarah. But Glenn Beck IS just another talking-heads show host. What exactly do you think he does for a living? And I don’t know anyone who wishes they had Beck as high school government teacher. Certainly not anyone who was actually interested in learning. There may have been some who thought he would be an easy grader since he wouldn’t have known any of the correct answers himself. And if his fingers were dusted with anything, it would have been cocaine.

Nevertheless, Time has seen fit to honor both Palin and Beck. It’s hard to see what Time regards as influential when both of these people have higher unfavorable ratings than favorable, and most of the country/world pays them no attention at all. Even a majority of Republicans think that Palin is unqualified to be president and Fox News left Beck off of their new ad promoting the network as “The Most Powerful Name In News.”

But that’s Time Magazine and the liberal media for ya.

Fox News Ratings Dive: American IQ Rebounds

Posted by on April 28, 2010 at 12:34 pm. 32 Comments :

Fox News Tea BagThe latest quarterly Nielsen ratings reveal a promising trend in cable news viewership. This has been a challenging time for all media and, while cable has been relatively stable, it has not been immune from a general advertising slump and softening audience.

While all three of the major cable news networks suffered primetime declines, MSNBC held its audience best, losing only 6% in the past quarter. By comparison Fox News dropped three times as much (-19%), and CNN collapsed (-40%).

CNN’s woes are not particularly surprising. They have utterly failed to define themselves in this era of advocacy journalism. Their approach to a middleground, news-centric broadcast is admirable, but poorly implemented. If they were truly interested in focusing on straight news, they would abandon the pretense of balancing every story on the basis of partisanship and instead balance it on the basis of truth. In other words, stop booking liars just to have a counter-argument. If one guest says the moon is a barren, rocky satellite, you do not need an opposing guest to assert that it’s lime Jello. Or if you do host the lime Jello spokesman, at least offer some post-debate analysis that makes it clear that the Jello argument is known to be false.

MSNBC has benefited in an ironic way by not having had a meteoric rise. Their numbers have been depressed by poor cable coverage and placement on premium tiers. As a result, they have had less distance to fall. Their performance appears to be better on a relative basis simply by maintaining a steady course.

More surprising is the precipitous drop at Fox News. They have been enjoying a surge in the past few years, even when their competition was hurting. For them to get hit so hard this quarter is a significant development. Fox has relied upon a fierce sense of loyalty on the part of their viewers to prop up their ratings. I have described it as something of cult (the Cult of Foxonality) wherein Fox viewers are actually more devoted to the network than to any political party of philosophy. The ratings this quarter suggest that the hold that Fox has had on its audience is weakening.

As evidence of Fox’s diminishing influence, take a look at their biggest star, Glenn Beck. He has lost fully one third of his audience since the beginning of the year. Apparently people are tiring of his redundant, hyperbolic screeds pronouncing that half of the Obama administration are communists and the other half are Satanists. He may also have lost viewers when he called the President a racist and when he insulted Christians by warning them to flee their church if it practiced social justice.

Beck has other problems as well. He has undoubtedly been hurt by an advertiser boycott that has seen a couple of hundred advertisers swear off his program. In the UK he is airing with no advertisers at all. In this environment, how long can Fox News justify keeping him on the schedule? They waved off the ad boycott by bragging about his ratings. With neither ads nor viewers, the only thing they have left is an unpopular clown act that is descending further into televangelism with every episode.

The dilemma for Fox News is complicated. From the start they have been on a mission to advance the conservative philosophy of their owner, Rupert Murdoch, and his henchman, Roger Ailes. Unfortunately for them, they have failed miserably in that regard. They threw everything they had at the Democrats and still lost control of Congress in 2006, lost the White House in 2008, and lost the health care debate in 2010. Despite their ratings dominance they have not been able to convert it to their electoral advantage. What happens when their ratings dominance is gone?

The battle within the Fox executive suites will be one that pits the accountants against the ideologues. And let’s face it, in the rarefied air of Fox News, the accountants are toast. My money is on Fox News doubling down and expanding their partisan rhetoric. That’s what they’ve done in the past. In the months leading up to and following the Obama victory in 2008, Fox didn’t bother to recognize a national trend. Instead, they fortified their conservative flank by signing new long-term contracts with Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. They axed Hannity’s foil, Alan Colmes. They hired reinforcements like Beck, Mike Huckabee, Karl Rove, Dana Perino, Judith Miller, and Sarah Palin. They are not the sort of competitors that back down in the face of adversity – or reason.

If Fox does escalate the wingnut war, they are making a poor bet. They already own the franchise on rightist zealots and are unlikely to gain viewers in that demographic. More likely they can expect to see their ratings decline further. Americans are sick of the divisive ravings of partisan shills who have to resort to making things up in order to sway the debate.

The good news is that since the audience for Fox News has declined, the collective IQ of the country has risen. OK, I made that up, but it seems entirely plausible. Fox News viewers have been shown to be notably less informed, or more misinformed, than the viewers of other networks or the public at large. So it stands to reason that the fewer people infected with Fox lies, the more intelligent we are as a nation. And going forward that can only be a boon to the development of public policy and to democracy itself.

Fox News (Lack Of) Journalistic Standards In Practice

Posted by on April 27, 2010 at 1:02 pm. 2 Comments :

This morning on Fox News a report was broadcast revealing new revelations about the costs of the recently passed health care bill. Anchor Megyn Kelly introduced the story with obvious shock and disdain for what she characterized as an attempt to keep information secret from Congress and the public.

The thrust of this alleged scoop was that the Department of Health and Human Services had authored a report that showed the costs of health care rising as a result of the new legislation. But the shocking part was the allegation that the report was suppressed by HHS and/or the White House prior to the vote in Congress.

Kelly spent almost seven minutes discussing this would-be scandal with Fox’s chief news anchor, Bret Baier, not some opinion show host like Sean Hannity. That’s seven minutes of valuable airtime devoted to a story that was picked up from the uber-conservative American Spectator, authored by someone who calls himself “the Prowler,” and backed up by a single anonymous source. And all of this was discussed after conceding that the story was unconfirmed.

Well, half an hour later, Kelly brings Baier back for a followup and guess what? The story was completely false. The HHS denied it and provided a timeline to document the course of events.

This perfectly illustrates the inner workings of Fox News and their standards for journalism. They will not hesitate to disseminate suspect information that is not backed up in the way that a responsible press operation would consider routine. Once their dubious report is released into the media atmosphere it is almost impossible to retrieve. There will have been numerous regurgitations on blogs and other Internet news sites. Emails will have started bouncing around the web even before Kelly finished the first bogus report. And by the time the truth is revealed, the lies are a part of the common knowledge in Wingnutia.

Rather than wait until a story has been checked out and confirmed, Fox News just lets it fly and crosses their fingers. Then when the facts become apparent they laugh it off or even portray it as an asset. This is what Kelly did after Baier crushed the HHS story. She proudly told her audience that “you saw it all unfold live, right here.” Indeed we did. We saw the poorly sourced, untrue accusations of a right-wing muckraker broadcast to millions over the air as if it were news. Then, if we were still tuned in, we saw the retraction of a story that was never fit to be aired in the first place.

Nice work Fox.

Will Rupert Murdoch Decide The Outcome Of The Election?

Posted by on April 26, 2010 at 12:34 pm. 2 Comments :

The American media stands to learn something from the British. The UK is presently approaching what may be an historic election day. Their two dominant parties, the conservative Tories and the supposedly liberal Labour Party, are being seriously threatened by the surging Liberal Democrats. The possibility exists that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg could be the next Prime Minister in a coalition government. Needless to say, this is causing apoplexy within the establishment parties.

Independent on MurdochConcurrent with the political upheaval is an intriguing drama playing out in the press. It began with The Independent publishing a special election issue whose headline called out their competition by name, something that media in the UK (and the US) rarely do. That touched a nerve at News Corp, whose top executives, James Murdoch (Rupert’s son and likely successor) and Rebekah Brooks, stormed the offices of The Independent and launched a profanity-laced rant at the editor:

“What the fuck are you playing at?” Murdoch asked Independent editor Simon Kelner. Murdoch accused Kelner of insulting his father’s reputation with an advertising campaign that declared: “Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election. You will.”

I’m not really sure what the Murdoch scion was so upset about. Was it that The Independent implied that Murdoch’s intention was to influence the election? If so, then why did Murdoch actually brag about doing so after the election in 1992 when his newspaper blasted the headline, “It’s the Sun wot won it?” Or was Jimmy upset that The Independent insulted daddy’s virility by saying that he would not have any impact over the election?

The video makes a salient and troubling point that Murdoch controls 40% of the press in Britain and that he isn’t shy about using it to advance his agenda. That’s a position that many Brits have held for years, but it isn’t often that members of the media class raise objections to such monopolistic domination within their ranks.

It doesn’t take much imagination to extend the story arc of this melodrama to the U.S. Rupert Murdoch’s grip on American media is at least as strangulating. And he, along with his network general Roger Ailes, blatantly stain their so-called news coverage with a bright red Republican hue. They feature GOP candidates repeatedly, providing them with valuable free airtime. Their anchors and contributors brazenly campaign, on the air and off, for Republican politicians and policies. And they castigate their political enemies as “despicable,” “socialist,” and even “treasonous.”

So the question is, how will the non-Fox media in this country respond? Will they challenge Fox’s unrelenting biases? Will they report that it exists? Would they ever imagine publishing a simple and reasonable question like “Will Rupert Murdoch Decide The Outcome of the Election?”

Sadly, all the evidence points to a negative answer in every instance. Either they regard the unwritten law against criticizing competing news enterprises as a mortal sin, or they are are just quivering cowards who couldn’t care less about honesty and ethics in journalism. Last year I wrote an article that asked “Who’s Afraid of Fox News?” It documented the lengths to which Fox would go to assault their media adversaries, while the rest of the press never bothered to swing back at Fox. What are they afraid of? Do they think that Ailes is going to barge into their offices and fleck spittle at them in a tempestuous tirade? Actually, that’s probably part of it, and is genuinely frightening.

One of the very few righteous counterpunches was delivered by the former editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines. He wrote an op-ed that asked a series of pointed and appropriate questions:

  • Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?
  • Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration – a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?
  • Why has our profession, through its general silence – or only spasmodic protest – helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?
  • Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?

Unfortunately, Raines wrote that after he was no longer working for the Times. He ought to have raised these questions when he had a platform to act on them and seek answers. Where are the working journalists now who will take Fox on and report the truth? Is there any media outlet in the U.S. with the courage of the U.K.’s Independent? Hopefully somebody here is paying attention because we have our own elections coming up later this year and the last thing we need is for Rupert Murdoch to decide the outcome.

Liberty University Taps Glenn Beck For Commencment Speech

Posted by on April 24, 2010 at 3:38 am. 7 Comments :

Glenn Beck GraduateThose lucky kids at Liberty University are in for a treat on graduation day this year. The conservative Christian institution has announced that Glenn Beck will be their commencement speaker. That should excite the student body.

What an inspiration it will be to have an alcoholic, drug-abusing, rodeo clown, college dropout up on stage advising these students on how to succeed in life by making goofy faces on TV while lying about your political adversaries. They will surely benefit from his lectures mangling history and accusing liberals of being fascists and the President of being a racist. Not to mention that Beck has just announced that God has spoken to him and revealed His plan for America. How many commencement speakers have a direct line to Heaven?

Beck’s message of unrelenting doom and destruction is a perfect fit for a school that includes Armageddon in its curriculum. Beck has prophesied that, unless we all accept his version of the truth, we’ll all be dead in five years. So why worry about not being able to find a job if the Rapture is right around the corner?

Beck will be able to relate his experiences as a suicidal failure who found redemption as a morning zoo radio shock jock. What better example could Liberty provide to these young folks as they prepare to go out into a foreboding world? Perhaps Beck will bring along his blackboard and diagram the connections between the school’s founder, Jerry Falwell, and the feminists and gays that Falwell blamed for 9/11. And he could talk about Falwell’s famous defense of segregation as “the Lord’s will.”

This will certainly be a day to remember for Liberty’s graduates. They should be grateful for their good fortune. Had they graduated in any of the previous four years they would have been stuck with adulterers like John McCain and Newt Gingrich, or Hollywood scoundrels like Chuck Norris, and Ben Stein. At least Beck will get them some media attention as the speech will likely be broadcast live as breaking news on the Fox News Channel.

Glenn Beck’s Excellent Vatican Adventure

Posted by on April 23, 2010 at 3:47 pm. 4 Comments :

Glenn Beck went to the Vatican and was anointed by…someone. You have to hear this to believe it. The tone of his voice, the pregnant pauses, all bring Jim Jones to mind. Unfortunately, the audio was deleted from the source, but here is the transcript:

BECK: We are entering a…we are entering a dark, dark period of man. Um, I was, um, I was in the Vatican, and I was surprised that the individual I was speaking to knew who I was. And they said: ‘Of course we know who you are. What you’re doing is wildly important. We’re entering a period of great darkness, and if good people don’t stand up, we could enter a period unlike we have seen in a very long time.’ It was odd to stand in the Vatican and hear those words. Of all places that would understand the Dark Ages.

Beck never bothered to identify the “individual” to whom he was speaking. The implication was that it was a Vatican official of some sort. The phrase “we know who you are,” suggests that it was not a private person speaking for himself, but a representative of a group. And Beck portrays this person as someone whose opinion carries some weight. Why else would we care that he regards Beck as “wildly important?” Of course, this is Glenn Beck we’re talking about, so it may just have been some schnook in line for the tour.

The creepy thing about this is that it is further evidence of Beck’s Messianic ambitions. He clearly wants to convince his audience that he is more than just a television pundit, he is a spiritual leader with a mandate from God. He even said as much on another program:

BECK: It’s darkness, and I can just feel it coming. And I started to say…I said the problem is…and I stopped. Because I don’t want to utter something like this without really thinking it through. But I was about to say, the problem is that God is giving a plan, I think, to me that is not really a plan. And I stopped myself because I didn’t want to utter those things out loud if that’s not exactly right, and it’s not. […]

Then I said the problem is is that I think the plan that the Lord would have us follow is hard for people to understand. But I’m telling you, here’s what I feel with everything in me. If you’ve listened to this program – oy, are they gonna use this against me – If you’ve listened to this program for a long time you know who I am. And you know that many of the things that I have done and said that have put me in, you know, harm’s way, one way or another, they always start at the same place. They always start at my gut or my heart. And then I figure it out as we go along. All the stuff that I feel has been important on this show has been things that I felt and didn’t understand. [..]

I beg of you to pray for clarity on my part. The plan that He would have me articulate, I think, to you, is “Get behind me.” And I don’t mean me, I mean Him. Get behind me. Stand behind me.

So God is giving him a plan (that isn’t really a plan) and you, his faithful listeners, know who he is (the Son of…?), and you know that he is suffering (in harm’s way) for your salvation as he prays to let this cup pass from him. Yet he will endure his fate and accept the things that he feels but doesn’t understand (not as I will, but as thou wilt). Yes, Glenn Beck is hearing the voice of God and passing His Word on to his disciples. First and foremost in the message is the imposing darkness that is enveloping us all. This is an image that Beck returns to often. It is an image of a world in total collapse:

“You’re gonna see a black and white world, man, that is nothing but destruction and ugly.”

“Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing, because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees. […] They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.”

“I know what our country is headed towards. I know the struggles that are ahead in my life and I know the struggles that are ahead in your life. It’s not going to be pretty.”

“It is the eve of destruction in America.”

“The rain is coming. I think you feel it in your gut. It is time to build an Ark. It is time to prepare yourself for some tough times.”

I don’t know where Beck wants to sail in his Ark, but I suspect it’s someplace like Guyana, or perhaps the free-market paradise of Somalia, the world’s best example of the conservative ideal of small government. Someplace he can preach to his congregants of God’s plan for him and the world he fears is doomed. And I hope his Ark is big enough to hold all those who are demented enough to want to follow him. America will be a better place when they set sail for their homogeneous, free-market, theocratic, utopia.

Newt Gingrich Calls The Tea Party The Militant Wing Of The GOP

Posted by on April 22, 2010 at 6:08 pm. 2 Comments :

It’s always encouraging when leaders of the Republican Losers Society inadvertently let fragments of truth escape from their highly secure and disciplined message machine. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it always revealing.

The New York Dispatch covered Newt Gingrich’s appearance today before the Manufacturers’ Association of South Central Pennsylvania. While signing books Gingrich addressed his fans and had this to say about the Tea Party:

“[It’s a] natural expression of frustration with Republicans and anger at Democrats [which is] more likely to end up as the militant wing of the Republican Party.”

With the media embroiled in debate about the impact and influence of the Tea Party, this is a remark from an authoritative source on the subject. And it comports with much of what we already know about the Tea Baggers. These are the same people who show up at rallies carrying signs that say “We came unarmed – this time.” In fact, even that soft-peddles the issue because in many instance they are already carrying arms.

Many Tea Baggers talk openly of sedition and firing on government officials, This talk is not just from wild-eyed nut cases, but includes Erick Erickson, CNN’s new political commentator. Glenn Beck has “joked” about poisoning Nancy Pelosi and choking Michael Moore. He has described progressives as a cancer in America that cannot be tolerated but must be cut out. This is the same Glenn Beck who ridicules others who talk about the right’s “eliminationist” tactics. What will Beck have to say about Gingrich’s heresy?

Gingrich’s comments come on the day that Politico publishes an article titled, “The tea party’s exaggerated importance.” This long overdue analysis from a right-leaning news source finally acknowledges what so many conscious observers have been saying for the past year: The Tea Party is a partisan, exclusionary assembly of white Republican conservatives angry at having lost the last election. The article goes on to recognize that the TeaPublicans have enjoyed press coverage that far exceeds what they deserve.

Of course, it was already well known by many that the Baggers were merely a niche group of fringe activists whose wealthy benefactors in the GOP and Fox News have inflated their public image beyond reality. Does anyone really believe that if the millionaires at FreedomWorks (who paid for the buses and the rallies) and Fox News (who handled the PR and advertising) had not promoted the Tea Party that anyone would be talking about them today? As it is, most polls show that anywhere from 40% to 69% of Americans have still never heard of the Tea Party or have no opinion of it.

This puts Gingrich’s comments in an odd perspective. It paints a picture of a small group of disgruntled outsiders who are being exploited by a political machine that regards them as their muscle. And since the Tea Baggers are known to have an affinity for firearms and a determination not to be tread upon, this could be like placing a gunpowder factory next to a fireworks testing ground.

We can only hope that Gingrich is wrong. The good news is that he wrong quite often. But that doesn’t excuse his characterization of the Tea Party or the frightening consequences of his assertion.

GEICO Fires Actor Over Tea Party Comment

Posted by on April 21, 2010 at 7:55 pm. 1 Comments :

Stop the presses – or should I say the video satellite uplinks. With health care off the docket, the media is clamoring to identify the next big story to misconstrue and sensationalize. And it looks like they found it.

Today on Fox News, Megyn Kelly preceded the airing of a shocking audio recording that she described as her “top story.” The recording was of a phone message left on the answering machine at FreedomWorks, the AstroTurf sponsors of the Tea Party movement headed by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey. The message said in part:

“I just need to know what the percentages of people that are mentally retarded who work for the organization.”

The caller, as it turns out, was Lance Baxter (aka D.C. Douglas), a voiceover actor who has done some work for GEICO Insurance. The prank call was brief and not particularly noteworthy. Baxter conceded on his blog that it was “stupid” and ultimately lowered him to the level of the Tea Baggers.

Fox Nation and the GEICO GeckoHowever, Fox News had a different assessment of the news value of this incident. They plucked the story up from Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment blog and featured it both on air and on the Fox Nation website. In doing so, they got the story all wrong. Note the caption to the graphic posted by the Fox Nationalists: “Is the Geico Lizard a Tea Party Crasher, Too?”

The problem here is that the voice of the GEICO gecko, Ricky Gervais, had nothing to do with any of this. Baxter had done some voiceovers for GEICO a couple of years ago wherein he introduced celebrities speaking on behalf of real GEICO customers. But anyone relying on Fox to report this exposé would have come away with the wrong impression of Gervais. Apparently, when Fox picked up this scoop from Breitbart, they regurgitated it errors and all, not bothering to verify the story or perform even the most minimal duties of responsible journalists. Why would they, they’re Fox?

As a consequence of his ill advised messaging, Baxter has been terminated by GEICO. This seems to be a bit of an overreaction to a private citizen exercising his right to free speech. But the outcry from right-wingers complaining to GEICO that this affront was unforgivable led to Baxter’s dismissal. Ironically, the very same right-wingers applaud far worse behavior by the likes of James O’Keefe and Jason Mattera. Those childish offenders are featured contributors to Breitbart’s website and are regularly syndicated to Fox. FYI: in the case of O’Keefe, the term offender is especially appropriate in that he was recently arrested on felony charges (later reduced to misdemeanors) for falsely representing himself as a telephone technician to the staff of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu.

To compound the embarrassment that Fox and Breitbart ought to feel (but certainly do not), when this story appeared on BigGovernment it was accompanied by yet another depiction of President Obama as Hitler. The picture was altered to include the GEICO gecko, but otherwise had no bearing on the story. I guess they are just so desperate to make the Nazi association that they’ll attach it to anything regardless of whether there is a substantive connection.

And the cherry on top is actually on the bottom and to the right. The very article about how terrible GEICO is for employing the Tea Party basher has an ad for GEICO immediately adjacent to the Hitler/Obama picture. Which just proves once again that commerce trumps everything. And with that in mind, it would be a great corporate coup if Progressive Insurance were to hire Baxter and feature him in their ads. It couldn’t be a better fit given the name of the company and the fact that the Tea Bag Pope, Glenn Beck, calls progressives a cancer on America.


Glenn Beck: Old News, Old School, And That Old-Time Religion

Posted by on April 21, 2010 at 11:08 am. 4 Comments :

Analyzing the Glenn Beck show reveals a cornucopia of phobias, rational breakdowns, and paranoid delusions. It would keep a psychotherapist occupied for weeks. But stuffed in between the narcissism, the fear mongering, and the Messianic complexes, there is a distinctly regressive aspect to Beck’s personality that manifests in everything he does. He is obsessed with an idealized past for which he yearns achingly.

His television show has entered a new phase wherein he presents himself as part evangelist, part history professor. When he isn’t exhorting his viewers to get down on their knees, or flee their social justice practicing church, he is filling them up with half truths (if that) about America’s founding. And like many brilliant madmen, Beck has even found a way to marry the two themes. He preaches feverishly that God is the only grantor of rights and that government has no role in such matters. Of course, many of our nation’s original rights were granted by the government via our Constitution. Beck gets around this fact by declaring that those particular government authorities were divinely inspired, elevating them to sainthood in his personal church. He never addresses the divinity of every other right that was granted by the government authors of constitutional amendments or legislation.

Beck’s history sermons are devoutly bizarre and unconnected to reality. He ties together unrelated events and concepts with the barest of threads. He has usurped the memory of our Founding Fathers and recast these revolutionaries as proctors of faith. He binds their works to the times in which they lived and insists that nothing be changed. That would be fine if humanity stood still and never progressed over time. But Beck believes that the Constitution is an immutable doctrine of biblical stature and he ridicules those who consider it a living document that adjusts over time and adopts the advances of accumulated learning and progress. In fact, he considers progress to be a destructive force that perverts the tried and true models of conduct of yesteryear. This is why he is so adamantly opposed to progressives and has woven a web of lies about a positive and productive political philosophy whose foundation is knowledge and … well … progress.

Beck seems to want desperately to travel back in time to a more innocent era that was never actually there. In his mind it was a simpler world where all the different shades of white people share common values of work, church, and obedience to an agreed upon ethical dogma. It was a world where a gun was a fixture on every man’s hip and women didn’t confuse things by aspiring to sit on the Supreme Court (or vote). Only in the past could this imaginary Eden have existed, and Beck wants to be there so badly that he populates his present with its symbols. Take a look a Beck’s set. It is an alter to anachronism.

He sits on a chair that he said, on a previous show, that he inherited from his grandfather. Next to him is a TV set that predates Ed Sullivan. He keeps a prop microphone on his desk from the golden age of radio. The red phone that he says is his direct line to the White House looks like the model that Nixon might have tapped. And his use of blackboards couldn’t be a clearer rejection of technology and the evils of modern society. Even the logo for his fiber cable-distributed TV show incorporates the concentric bands of old-fashioned radio waves.

By the way, that’s a real chyron at the bottom of the screen, and solid evidence of Beck’s distorted view of history. If thinks the 1960’s was a decade of unity – if he’s forgotten the turmoil of war, civil rights struggles, and the cultural divisions in everything from music to morality – then he’s more senile than his audience.

While Beck clings longingly to the past, he almost never addresses the future without some allusion to doom. He has predicted the end of America and democracy, the collapse of the world economy, the forsaking of decency and values, and a near-term fate that is nothing short of Armageddon. The present is just a cauldron of misery that must be grudgingly endured until the Rapture. But it is his attachment to bygone years that really defines his world view. And he may actually have a very good reason for this.

The devolutionary posture Beck has assumed is convenient from a ratings standpoint. Beck’s audience (along with the rest of Fox News and the Tea Party crowd) skews to an older demographic than the average of the nation at large. They must take comfort in the familiar icons of an analog world. Blackboards are less threatening than the computer-generated motion graphics that all the kids are into these days. And all the talk of history is just the sort of entertainment that would appeal to people rooted in the past. Add to that a touch of that old-time religion and you have a recipe for corralling the curmudgeon community who wants nothing more than for those damn kids to get off of their lawns.

That is Beck’s fan base. They enjoy reminiscing about how much better things were in their day. And the last thing they want to hear about is a future that they won’t be present to witness. It’s never good business to remind people of their mortality, particularly the people who are closest to it. Beck is adept at accommodating (manipulating?) these folks who have plenty of free time to sit at home and watch his program in the middle of the day. Sure it cuts into the early-bird special at Applebee’s, but what they hunger for is far more fundamental. It’s the solace they get from the passionate young man whose weepy patriotism validates their conviction that they were indeed the greatest generation and, dagnabbit, they’re not gonna let you whippersnappers forget it.

Now, I don’t want to go overboard with generalizations. Most senior citizens are thoughtful, rational people with a wealth of accumulated experience. Just not the ones watching Glenn Beck. They are consumed with fear and are grateful that someone is articulating the nightmares that torment them. Knowing that somebody else sees the monsters too makes them feel less crazy. And the visual cues scattered around Beck’s studio, along with the daily affirmations of pseudo-history, the backward-looking books, the revival meetings on the road, and the reliance on salvation, all produce a comfort zone for a few of America’s severely demented old fogies. If watching Beck’s show keeps some of them off the freeway, then maybe he’s performing a public service after all.