| Glenn Beck: I could give a flying crap about the political process. […] We’re an entertainment company.
On the surface, it appears that these are stipulations that the ideological prejudice of Fox News is a calculated ploy to garner the sort of devoted viewers that translate into higher ratings. If that’s true, then Fox’s viewers ought to feel manipulated and insulted by this blatant exploitation, not to mention the offense at having been deliberately misinformed.
However, there may be an entirely different reason for these recent assertions. Fox has been taking a considerable amount of heat lately for their glaringly unbalanced and unprofessional coverage of the news. They are losing advertisers on some of their top programs. There are thoughtful conservatives expressing their distaste for the hysterical extremism the network has come to represent. And they are becoming the laughing stock of broadcast journalism.
Consequently, it may be the intention of the Fox hierarchy to separate themselves from their disreputable and embarrassing departure from ethical journalism. And by asserting that their mission the whole time was to provide entertainment and increase ratings, they think they can shield themselves from the charges of shoddy and biased reporting. They are saying, in effect, that they have not been taking sides politically, they have merely been staging a performance aimed at an audience hungry for theater.
That’s a lose/lose argument. In effect they are conceding that they produce shoddy journalism, but they’re only doing it to lure gullible viewers. So this argument shows neither an appreciation for ethical reporting, nor respect for their audience. And the sad thing is that their audience will never accept or understand this, even if they were to hear about it. Which is unlikely if they stay tuned to Fox News.
Personally, I don’t buy this argument. While it is obvious that Fox plays to the gut for entertainment value, the political bias runs so deep that it could not possibly be incidental. So in the end, Fox is guilty of both exploitation and partisanship. It’s the worst of both worlds.
In the journalism game it is often pointed out that bias in reporting is as evident in slanted content as it is in the editorial decisions as to what gets in the paper or on the air. In other words, if you watch Bill O’Reilly interview uber-rightist media critic Bernie Goldberg, you can probably recognize the bias in that coverage. But you won’t witness the inverse bias of lefty media critic Jeff Cohen because O’Reilly won’t invite him in for an interview. The bias that O’Reilly is engaging in is his decision to filter out people like Cohen altogether.
Of course, it is much easier to observe bias when reading or watching a story than it is by having to figure out what has been kept from you. Especially because you often don’t know what you don’t know.
Fox News is adept at the discretionary editorial approach to bias. That’s why they regularly feature folks like Goldberg or Karl Rove or Ann Coulter, but rarely if ever give time to Michael Moore or Paul Krugman. And it isn’t restricted to personalities. Fox News serves as a veritable publicity machine for the Tea Party movement. However, a recent immigration reform rally in Washington that far exceeded the attendance of many Tea Parties was virtually ignored by Fox. Even in stories they deem worthy of coverage, they exercise a selective process for what their viewers are exposed to.
For instance, last February brought record low temperatures and snow storms to much of the east coast, including the Fox studios in New York. Everyone on the network took that as evidence that Global Warming was a hoax that couldn’t possibly be defended by anyone who had gone out of doors. How could climate change science be accurate if it was snowing outside during winter, they wondered on show after show? Of course, climate and temperature are two different things, but that played no part in their analysis. It was simply about the weather at the time.
So why have their been no reports on Fox in the past week that corroborate climate change science considering that the temperature in New York has just hit record highs? Obviously, if it is hot outside, and it isn’t even summer yet, the planet must be dangerously heating up. The reason you won’t see that story is because Fox News only jumps to conclusions that conform to their prejudices.
In another example, Fox News went to great lengths to criticize President Obama’s economic record when he had only been in office less than two months. They dubbed the market decline from inauguration day on January 20, through February “Obama’s Bear Market.”
In the following month of March the market gained over 1,300 points in a record setting advance, yet Fox News found an appropriately derogatory label: Obama’s Bear Market Rally. And now, after a year that saw a 36% rise in the market, Fox News isn’t even reporting on it all. Well, Neil Cavuto did do a commentary on how he was wrong about the administration’s policies, noting that the economy was performing quite well. He itemized actual market metrics that validated the improving environment. But he ended it with a smirk and a nod to the date: April Fools Day. And even though the data he presented was accurate, he turned the whole thing into a joke and scoffed at the notion that he would never say such positive things about this administration. There was no further discussion of the past year’s rapid market ascent.
That, my friends, is selective editing at its worst. If the facts of a story are contrary to your partisan prejudices, just refrain from reporting the story in way, shape, or form. Plus, no one can accuse you of inserting biases into a report that you never made. It’s a win/win for unethical media douche bags.
The way you can tell if a protest is effective is when the target of the action can’t stop complaining about it. For two days in a row, Glenn Beck has devoted valuable airtime to castigating the proponents of an advertiser boycott that began last year in response to Beck calling President Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred of white people.”
For Beck to divert so much time from fabricating paranoid conspiracy theories to fabricating smears on his perceived enemies is revealing. His anxiety could not be more apparent, even as he pretends that the efforts directed against him are making him happy:
“The fact is, I haven’t felt this good and positive in a long time. Why? Because the boycott attempts are the most transparent AstroTurf attacks I have ever seen or ever heard of.”
Ever? The truth is that the boycotts were initiated by a very small group that most people (including me) had never heard of. Color of Change began the effort with a small email list and a campaign to communicate with Beck’s advertisers. This shoestring effort produced surprising results, getting more than 100 advertisers to refuse to permit their commercials on Beck’s show. [Note: StopBeck later joined the effort further enhancing its effectiveness]
Beck spent the majority of his rebuttal inventing a plot that went all the way up to the White House. The first brick thrown by Beck was at his perennial nemesis, Van Jones. However, while Jones was a co-founder of Color Of Change, he left the organization two years prior to the Beck boycott. That didn’t stop Beck from building his cloud castle of hate.
He then tied Jones to Rev. Jim Wallis of the Sojourners. However, Wallis had nothing to do with the advertiser boycott, then or now. Wallis entered the picture after Beck took an astonishingly stupid stand against social justice and advised his listeners to “run” from any church that advocated it. Wallis responded by calling for Christians who believe in the venerable Christian practice of social justice to run from Glenn Beck.
And of course, Beck had to inject his distaste for working Americans by slandering unions. So he tethered Andy Stern to the boycott effort, although Stern and his SEIU had no part in the year-old boycott until about two weeks ago when they signed on with a new push by MoveOn.org.
After this hallucinatory construction of a widespread cabal attacking him, Beck capped it off with a wild accusation that it was a high level plot that the President was “coordinating from the Oval Office”:
“Is it possible, maybe, that pointing out every night that there are radicals, Marxists, and communists, in the White House, maybe that struck a nerve? Has someone decided that they must destroy my career and silence me because we’ve stumbled onto something? […] Has there ever been a case in American history…where an American president administration tried to destroy the livelihood of a private citizen with whom they disagree. Can’t think of any.”
Beck’s paranoia led to this declaration that nothing like this had ever happened before. He then immediately contradicted himself by comparing it to Richard Nixon’s famous “enemies list.” The only problem with that comparison is that Nixon’s list was documented and Beck’s delusions still only exist in his twisted cranium. What’s more, Nixon sought to use the power of the government against his opponents, but the Beck boycott relies entirely on the efforts of individual citizens engaging in free expression. Nevertheless, Beck elevates this to an absurd altitude wherein he literally compares himself with victims of Nazi atrocities:
“Where’s the media? Do the rest of you in this business think it’s gonna stop with me? Really? Once they get me what happens to you? Is there absolutely no chance whatsoever that you might be a target at some point in the future? What is that poem…First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent…”
Now they are coming for Glenn Beck. It is so like Beck to manifest his Messianic complex in this fashion. He is the persecuted one that suffers for his congregation. And his stylings are getting more televengelical and Apocalyptic by the day. Witness this fire and brimstone sermon:
It is a bizarre world. It is an upside down, inside out, quantum physics world. […] It is the eve of destruction in America.
I believe in God. I believe rights come from man, and this Constitution, and the founding of this nation, were divinely inspired. These are God’s rights and God’s freedoms.
If we appreciate those rights, if we do the right thing […] we are going to have to pay the consequence for our living and mistreating these rights. But in the end, have no fear, because nothing will thwart Him. Because these are His rights. This was His Constitution. This was His country for His purposes, not ours. And nothing…nothing…will thwart Him in the end.
Hallelujah. This may be the first time I have heard anyone declare that the Constitution was “divinely inspired.” To my knowledge, it has not been included in any version of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have not been beatified, nor is George Washington a saint. But in Beck’s mind a new holy doctrine has been proclaimed. One that permitted human slavery and denied women the right to vote. If the Constitution was divinely inspired, then what right did later generations have to amend it? Were they also the servants of God? And if so, did God screw up when he ratified Prohibition or the right to levy income taxes?
I have said this before, and it is all too apparent that it must be repeated: I genuinely hope that the people who care for Glenn Beck get him the help that he so obviously requires. It is way too tempting for his family and his producers and his hangers on, to hold back and revel in the riches he generates for them. But they will surely regret it when he self-destructs and splatters them all with the blood of their greed.
Now I’m sounding a little Biblical. And so I speaketh not further for the time is at hand for me to shuteth up. For now…..
The chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has endured many decades as a right-wing purveyor of tabloid pseudo-news enterprises around the world. His power and influence has been felt in the halls of governments and the boardrooms of corporations. His opinions have been sought after and received with great deference. But that’s all over now.
In an appearance at a forum for the public affairs TV series, The Kalb Report, Murdoch exhibited clear signs that he has lost touch with reality. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post was there and reported some examples of Murdoch’s mental decline. It begins with the ludicrous assertion that the staff at his competitors MSNBC and CNN “tend to be Democrats” but that his own Fox News presenters “are not Republicans.” He did not, however, bother to identify a single Democrat at his rivals’ networks, and when pressed, he was also unable to name one on his own.
More importantly, Murdoch seems to have completely forgotten that he employs the most recent vice-presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, as well as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee. And let’s not forget other avowed Republican Fox Newsers Karl Rove, Rick Santorum, Dana Perino, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Laura Ingraham, John Bolton, Dan Senor, Linda Chavez, and Oliver North. Fox is lousy with Republicans, but in his diminished capacity Murdoch is so confused about the political affiliation of his crew that he can declare aloud and in public that there aren’t any such people working for him.
In another departure from reality, Murdoch was asked if it was ethical for Fox to promote the Tea Party movement. For anyone paying attention it is clear that Fox became a virtual publicity machine for the Tea Baggers.
They aired numerous interviews of Bagger spokespeople including their chief strategist and fundraiser, Dick Armey. They had reporter Griff Jenkins riding along on the Tea Party Express bus. They dispatched their top anchors, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, and Neil Cavuto, to host Tea Party events across the nation. They even branded branded some of the events as “FNC Tea Parties.” But Murdoch’s response to the inquiry was rife with bewilderment:
“No. I don’t think we should be supporting the Tea Party or any other party. But I’d like to investigate what you are saying before condemning anyone.”
Either he never watches his own network or his memory and comprehension skills have utterly collapsed. He must also not be paying much attention to that Internet thing. For several months Murdoch has been promising to put all of his online news content behind a pay wall. He has spoken out harshly against what he deems theft by news aggregators like Google. Never mind that he can stop Google from indexing his web sites anytime he wants with just a few lines of code. At the Kalb forum he reiterated his opinion saying…
“We will be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s it. Followed by a subscription form.”
You would hope that someone on his staff (or his nurses) would advise him that that is exactly what they do now. If you search Google for news content, you will get only a headline and a couple of sentences. Then you can click the link to go to the full story on the content owner’s web site. Contrary to his misconception, this drives traffic to Murdoch’s site, it doesn’t steal anything. And what Murdoch doesn’t acknowledge (if he even remembers) is that he owns web sites that actually do steal content from other news sources. His Fox Nation, for example, is a news aggregator that does not pay for the articles it features, but reprints much more than a couple of sentences from them – sometimes the whole article.
The general tone of this interview ought to be disturbing to Murdoch’s family and doctors. He really appears to be suffering from an acute cognitive failure. These are not the sort of logical missteps made by someone who has built an international media empire. Murdoch is either profoundly distracted or is losing the mental acuity to perform his duties. It may be time for him to consider stepping aside and let his kids screw up the world for awhile.
Addendum: Additional reporting on the Kalb interview reveals that Murdoch…
- …doesn’t consider Sarah Palin to be a journalist. (Duh!)
- …believes that Greta Van Susteren is a Democrat. (Never mind her adoration of Sarah Palin for whom her husband is an advisor)
- …thinks the iPad will save newspapers. (Right. A $600.00 device possessed by a fraction of American households, that will charge extra for subscriptions, is going to replace a news source that was delivered for pennies a day to any American doorstep)
Keep ’em coming, Rupert.
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Columnist Cristina Corbin has wandered dangerously far away from the wingnut campground we know as Fox News. She