Rachel Maddow Beats Hannity’s Media Bias Special

Posted by on April 25, 2011 at 11:33 pm. 5 Comments :

It’s time for the folks at Britannica to replace whatever picture they’ve been using to illustrate “poetic justice” and insert Rachel Maddow’s picture in its place.

Last Friday, Fox News broadcast a special episode of the Sean Hannity program that promised to get “Behind the Bias,” of what he called the liberal, Obama-mania media. What was truly special about the show is that it came in second place to Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC. Maddow beat Hannity in the key advertising demographic of 25-54 year olds. How fitting for Hannity to lose to a liberal on the night he thought he would be exposing them.

Hannity began the program by saying…

“Now, it is common knowledge that the mainstream media, from the major television networks to the country’s most influential newspapers, are biased against the GOP.”

Common knowledge? Sure it is. It is common in that it is unexceptional or of inferior quality. And it is knowledge in the same way that lemmings “know” to follow their fellow lemmings off the cliff.

Hannity provided nothing in the hour-long program to support his opening assertion of bias against the GOP. He certainly didn’t address the fact that the top Sunday news broadcasts have featured far more Republicans than Democrats. And he failed to note that all three broadcast networks are owned by giant, multinational corporations with predictably conservative leanings. And there was no mention that even newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post advance conservative themes like support for Wall Street and foreign wars. And, of course, he didn’t discuss the role of Fox News itself as the preeminent organ of institutional bias and its being a part of a conservative empire that includes the Wall Street Journal, 27 television stations, dozens of newspapers, Internet sites, and satellite broadcasting.

The show was mainly a collection of incidents that Hannity regarded as bias. However, that does not actually prove bias. It only catalogs it. And since Hannity makes no effort to catalog all incidents of bias, including those on the right, he proves nothing. Furthermore, there is a difference between cataloging random, subjective soundbites by individuals, and conducting an objective content analysis that looks at the whole institution of the media. Hannity doesn’t come anywhere near that sort of examination.

In short, Hannity’s program on bias was blatantly biased. It would be easy to collect twice as many examples of right-wing media disparaging the left as Hannity presented directed at Republicans. But what is even worse is that Hannity had to manufacture some of his evidence of bias.

For instance, he played a clip of Katie Couric saying “Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead.” Hannity left that sentence fragment hanging with the implication that it was Couric expressing her own opinion. Had he played the clip for a few seconds longer, his audience would have heard her say “The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today.” She went on to say that the book’s conclusions were “startling” and that the author still thought Reagan was “a great president.” But Hannity chose to misrepresent a tiny slice of the comment in order to advance his phony premise.

It is heartening to know that Hannity’s hour of deceit was so poorly received. It is even more gratifying that he was beaten in the ratings by someone as conscientious and committed to honest discourse as Rachel Maddow.

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House GOP Lawyer Is News Corp Board Member

Posted by on April 25, 2011 at 6:01 pm. NO Comments :

Earlier this year the White House announced that they would cease to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), believing that it was, in fact, unconstitutional. That stirred up a frenzy of Fox News fury over the audacity of the President refusing to enforce the law of the land. Of course, that utterly dishonest characterization distorted the fact that the administration was only declining to defend constitutional challenges, but would continue to enforce the law.

Not to be appeased, last week, Speaker John Boehner’s office announced that House Republicans would hire their own attorney, for $520 per hour, to litigate the GOP’s support for DOMA. The attorney they hired was former Bush Solicitor General Paul Clement of King & Spaulding.

Now ThinkProgress is reporting that King & Spaulding has dropped the case and Clement has resigned from the firm. King & Spaulding released a statement saying that they “determined that the process used for vetting this engagement was inadequate.” However, speculation is that the firm, which has a strong track record with gay issues, acceded to complaints from gay advocates and concluded that this case was not consistent with its mission.

In the meantime, Clement announced that he would continue to represent Boehner’s pro-DOMA case with his new law firm Bancroft PLLC. Bancroft’s lead partner is Viet D. Dinh, a former high ranking official in the Bush Justice Department. More interesting is that Dinh is also a member of the Board of Directors of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of Fox News. This raises the question as to how Fox News will cover this constitutional controversy.

Fox has already taken a radical position with contributor Newt Gingrich warning that Obama could be impeached, saying that “clearly it is a violation of his constitutional oath.” Anchor Megyn Kelly said much the same thing, and contributor Monica Crowley went further, portraying the President as a dictator: “That is Mubarak Obama. You can’t just pick and choose which law you’re gonna enforce.”

If this is what we have presently with Fox News aggressively asserting its opinion on the matter of equality, what can we expect going forward when the counsel for House Republicans is working for a member of the Board of Directors of News Corp? Clearly, the legal ethics at Fox News is no better than their journalistic ethics.


Fox News Ignores Donald Trump’s NBC Ties

Posted by on April 25, 2011 at 1:42 pm. 1 Comments :

For much of the past decade Fox News has been a virulent opponent of NBC. They have severely lashed out at its news division and many of the hosts on their MSNBC cable arm. The attacks have ranged from NBC being in bed with President Obama to being responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq.

Rupert Murdoch’s news empire has made it their mission to destroy NBC. In addition to castigating people like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, they aimed their vitriol at the executive suites. Bill O’Reilly famously called GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt “a despicable human being.” Meanwhile, Murdoch’s New York Post trades in gossipy articles about Olbermann’s mental health and even published his home address, a despicable act whose only purpose was to incite acts of violence.

That makes it all the more curious that Fox News has not said a single derogatory word about Donald Trump’s affiliation with NBC. Does Fox know that “The Apprentice” is an NBC program? This fact seems to have evaded their attention entirely. After so many years of lambasting NBC as a bastion of liberal propaganda, why do they suddenly have no complaints? In fact, why aren’t they praising NBC for employing one of their favorite conservative prospects for the GOP nomination for president?


The only place I have heard any criticism of NBC for its affiliation with Trump is on MSNBC. That’s a rather startling turn of events as it is almost unheard of for a network to permit such intramural attacks. But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has been unrelenting in his denouncement of Trump’s show and of NBC for running it. He has noted its declining ratings and mocked its ludicrous presentation of iconic wackos like LaToya Jackson and Gary Busey. And O’Donnell was not the least bit reserved in saying that…

“The NBC standard for crazy people in their primetime schedule saying evil and hateful things…apparently you can do that on NBC.”

O’Donnell, like many others, believes that Trump’s prospective campaigning is only about ratings for his struggling program. If that’s true he is failing miserably. The last episode of Celebrity Apprentice drew 7.6 million viewers, down from 8.2 million the previous week and 9.7 million the week before that, right after he began his Birther spiel. That likely reflects the response of entertainment program viewers who are turned off by Trump’s politicking, particularly the ignorant, dishonest manner in which engages in it.

Both Fox and NBC are tiptoeing around whether their employees are de facto candidates for president. NBC is being coy about Trump even as he polls his Apprentice contestants on-air as to whether he should run (Meatloaf and Star Jones have endorsed him). Fox has suspended contributors Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich while permitting Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin to continue to exploit their Fox presence. [Note: Santorum and Gingrich have just one week to make their intentions known or Fox will cut them loose. No news on Huckabee or Palin]

But only Fox has demonstrated full-blown hypocrisy by completely avoiding the relationship between NBC and Trump, despite their prior obsession with bashing NBC. Could it be that they don’t want to hamper his idiotic promotion of Birtherism so that he can continue to disparage the President? Or are they just reluctant to draw attention to the fact that NBC isn’t as liberally biased as they pretend? Either way Fox is affirming their own dishonesty and lack of journalistic ethics. But then, that isn’t really news, is it?


Rupert Murdoch’s Climate Change Hypocrisy

Posted by on April 23, 2011 at 3:23 pm. 21 Comments :

The folks at Climate Progress have compiled a pretty comprehensive report documenting the hypocrisy of Rupert Murdoch and his cable news mouthpiece, Fox News. They cover the vast territory between the private and public pronouncements of the rightist propaganda empire.


This is an area that News Corpse has covered in the past exposing the dishonesty of Fox anchors like Glenn Beck and Neil Cavuto, as well as the editorial deceit of Fox’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, who has issued directives to engage in deliberate disinformation.

The evidence of a so-called “news” network speaking out of both sides of its microphone are neatly detailed in the Climate Progress article. It shows that Murdoch and Fox are actively seeking to fleece both sides of the flock when it comes to the debate over Global Warming. They want to present a public image as a good corporate citizen for their business partners and clients, but they are also determined to advance the science denial rhetoric that their political allies and viewers expect.

That’s how you can have statements from Murdoch bragging about the environmental responsibility of News Corp as they achieve carbon neutrality, and later watch Sean Hannity as he declares that Climate Change is a hoax. It’s how you can observe the incongruous spectacle of Beck accusing all Global Warming activists of being socialists while a special, green-tinged Fox logo spins at the bottom of the screen during “Green Week.”


Keep it up Rupert. You are building an empire that is rapidly losing the trust of all sentient beings. But at least you can take pride in the knowledge that you are making your viewers more stupid with every minute they watch.


What If Atlas Shrugged And No One Was There To See It?

Posted by on April 21, 2011 at 11:01 am. 10 Comments :

The film version of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s soporific paean to malevolent ego-centrism, has finally been released to the throngs of slobbering Tea Baggers desperate for some cinematic validation. Sadly for these pathetic flim(flam) buffs, this flick hardly fills the void in their lost souls.

Atlas ShruggedThe movie is being released as “Part 1” with the promise of two more in the unlikely event that this one turns a profit. But the circumstances of its production foretell its dreary fate. Producer John Aglialoro has stated publicly that he was forced to commence production a few days short of the expiration of his rights to the book. As a result it was hurried into production without a script or a cast. He also admitted that casting was difficult because “Talent agencies were not sending us many of their top people.” Apparently no one of note wanted to be associated with a project that had been aborted on numerous occasions. That’s why one of the most popular books of the last half century is coming to the screen with unknown TV talent in the leads. The director complained that he didn’t have the necessary time to make the movie he wanted to make. It’s almost as if the principals are preemptively making excuses for why the movie sucks so bad. And they aren’t the the only ones who think so. The reviews have been merciless:

Roger Ebert: “The most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it.”

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: “The book was published in 1957, yet the clumsiness of this production makes it seem antediluvian.”

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: “It has taken decades to bring Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to the big screen. They should have waited longer.”

Kurt Loder, Reason Online: “The new, long-awaited film version of Atlas Shrugged is a mess, full of embalmed talk, enervated performances, impoverished effects, and cinematography that would barely pass muster in a TV show. Sitting through this picture is like watching early rehearsals of a stage play that’s clearly doomed.”

Peter Dubruge, Variety: “Part one of a trilogy that may never see completion, this hasty, low-budget adaptation would have Ayn Rand spinning in her grave.”

Washington Post: “Nearly as stilted, didactic and simplistic as Rand’s free-market fable.”

Some of the most damning criticism highlighted above comes from those who might otherwise be considered the film’s target audience, for instance the Wall Street Journal (Fox’s newsprint cousin) and Reason Magazine (the imprint of Randian Libertarianism).

From the start the film’s prospects were dim. It was an independent with little backing and decades of false starts. In order to preserve his rights, Aglialoro bankrolled the project with $10 million of his own money. Without a heavyweight distributor they had to be creative. So they hit up the Tea Party circuit for support.

A trailer for the film debuted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. It was screened for such cultural tastemakers as John Boehner, and Andrew Breitbart (yes, that was sarcasm). Then they brought in the big guns: FreedomWorks, the AstroTurf Tea Party organizers sponsored by the billionaire Koch brothers. Matt Kibbe, the president and CEO of FreedomWorks went to work promoting the film via his Freedom Connector social network (which has been prominently plugged by Glenn Beck), and a massive email list. It doesn’t appear to have worked.

The boxoffice for the opening weekend, timed to coincide with the federal tax filing deadline, was middling at best. The movie pulled in $1.7 million for three days from 300 screens. The take dropped nearly 50% from Friday to Sunday, which doesn’t bode well for increasing the number of screens in the weeks ahead (and the universally dreadful reviews won’t help either). The filmmakers are already touting the per-screen attendance numbers, but what they fail to acknowledge is that per-screen sales are generally higher for limited releases because more people are funneled into fewer venues.

[Update: Weekend #2 – Tea Baggers stayed away from Atlas Shrugged in droves. The movie earned half as much money as the previous weekend despite playing in 165 more theaters (+55%)]

The truth is that the Tea Party marketing has been less than spectacular (perhaps because the Tea Party doesn’t actually exist). If FreedomWorks has a couple of million people on their mailing list and all of the film’s viewers were FreedomWorkers (not likely), then 90% of their supporters ignored the call to action. The weak turnout by the Tea Party set mirrors their weakness at the annual Tax Day rallies where mere dozens bothered to show up.

The affinity for Ayn Rand by the Tea Party has always been a bit of a mystery. Sure, there is a shared hostility for government, particularly when it endeavors to fulfill its Constitutional obligation to provide for the general welfare. Both Rand and the TP’s despise efforts to aid society’s less fortunate, whom they believe deserve to suffer. But how do predominantly Christian, patriot, Tea Partyers justify their idolization of an anti-American, atheist who regards compassion as evil and selfishness as the pinnacle of human values?

Ironically, a key theme of the book and the film is the rejection of society by the wealthy business class who mysteriously disappear. There is a correlation to that plot point in contemporary America as we have already witnessed the disappearance of business luminaries like Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff, Dennis Kozlowski, Bernard Ebbers, and John Rigas, to name a few. It doesn’t appear that society has suffered from their absence. Yet there is another industrial titan who not only hasn’t vanished, he is masquerading across the airwaves as a presidential candidate. I’m not sure Ayn Rand would approve of this, however, the popularity of Donald Trump at Tea Parties is perfectly understandable. He is the ultimate manifestation of Randian politics: a greedy, conceited, selfish bully. But for every Tea Party supporter there are probably twenty other Americans who wish that Trump would “go Galt.”

There is another curious irony in the marketing strategy for the film. Tea Partyers and other Rand fans were furiously emailing appeals to their friends and Facebook buddies to implore them to see the movie – not because they considered it great cinema, they hadn’t seen it yet – but because strong ticket sales would somehow validate the book’s principles. In Rand’s world money equals truth. They regard the quality of the film as secondary to the need for boxoffice success in order to advance their agenda and to prove the power of the Tea Party as a consumer/political force. In other words, these Utopian free marketeers were afraid to trust the free market to decide the film’s fate.

Alas for them, it will anyway. And in the end, all anyone will remember of this drivel is that, when moviegoers were presented with a poorly planned, shoddily executed load of dreck, the audience shrugged.

This is far more entertaining:


Piss Beck

Posted by on April 20, 2011 at 11:37 am. 3 Comments :

BREAKING NEWS from the delusional world of Glenn Beck’s Acute Paranoia Revue:

Beck: Have you heard this reported yet? Palm Sunday. Four people from an anti-Christian group attacked two pieces of religious artwork in France.


There may be a very good reason why you haven’t heard that reported yet. If you were to go to the Guardian web site that Beck referenced you would find a story that says…

“When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion.

Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an ‘anti-blasphemy’ campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.”

You see, it was not “an anti-Christian group” that attacked the artwork, as Beck stated. It was a group of Catholic fundamentalists. So either Beck is lying or he never actually read the article. Furthermore, it is curious that Beck would condemn an attack on a piece of artwork that he surely regards as blasphemous. Is he defending “Piss Christ” as free expression? That would be an enlightened position for him to take and thus, unlikely. In any case, he still shouldn’t accuse anti-Christians of the vandalism when it was Christians who were responsible.

I wonder if Beck would still condemn the vandalism if he knew it was Christians who committed it. I also wonder if Beck will correct this “mistake” as he frequently brags that he will always put his corrections up front. We’ll see.

Flashback: Beck’s last excursion into art criticism was a hilariously demented tour of the art in Manhattan architecture that he said was loaded with subliminal socialist messages. He saw these messages everywhere and particularly in structures built by the notoriously communist Rockefeller family.

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Andrew Breitbart Throws Glenn Beck Under The Bus For Throwing Him Under The Bus

Posted by on April 20, 2011 at 10:47 am. 2 Comments :

This just keeps getting better.

Last week the feud between conservative stalwarts Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson became public in a big way with Carlson’s web site citing numerous rightist pundits who claim that Beck has plagiarized them. Beck shot back accusing his critics of jealousy.

Andrew Breitbart was one of those cited in Carlson’s story. Today Breitbart upped the ante by telling the New York Observer that Beck “threw me under the bus” during the Shirley Sherrod affair when Sherrod was defamed as a racist in a deceptively edited video. Breitbart reveals that Beck had worked with him in the preparation and editing of the video.

Breitbart: Next thing I know, I’m under complete attack without the support of Glenn Beck, who I thought was somebody I could count on.

This is a startling revelation. First it’s an admission that there was an intent to misrepresent Sherrod in the video, something that Breitbart has previously denied. And it also casts Beck as a co-conspirator. This is significant because Beck has tried to portray himself as someone who had rejected the Sherrod video when it was first released by Breitbart.

Beck: We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard – because context matters. That’s how we do things.

Not exactly. First of all, Beck only defended Sherrod on his afternoon television program after the video hoax had been revealed. On his radio show that morning he castigated her saying that we “have video tape of a USDA administration official discriminating against white farmers.”

So Beck participated in the dishonest editing of the video with Breitbart, used his morning radio show to promote the phony clip that he helped to create, and by the time his TV show aired later the same day, and the bottom had dropped out of the story, he pretends to be pristine and unaffiliated as he defends the poor victim of Breitbart’s slander and the White House’s knee-jerk over-reaction.

What a piece of ….. work.


Watch Out Fox News: FTC Seeks To Halt Fake News Sites

Posted by on April 19, 2011 at 2:19 pm. 5 Comments :

Fox NewsFrom the Federal Trade Commission,
April 19, 2011:

“The Federal Trade Commission is requesting federal courts to temporarily halt the allegedly deceptive tactics of 10 operations using fake news websites […] According to the FTC, the defendants operate websites that are meant to appear as if they belong to legitimate news-gathering
organizations, but in reality the sites are simply advertisements aimed at deceptively enticing consumers…”

Fox News is not one of the ten operations cited in this action, but given the description of the violations, could they be far behind? The FTC is taking aggressive steps toward reigning in deceptive practices that “attempt to portray an objective, journalistic endeavor,” says David Vladeck, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Almost everything about these sites is fake.”

If that is the basis for this action, then Fox News ought to be the next target of the FTC’s investigative unit. They blatantly endeavor to portray themselves as a legitimate news-gathering organization while deliberately deceiving viewers. They employ anchors who openly advocate for political issues and candidates despite claiming to be “fair and balanced,” a slogan that in itself violates the FTC’s truth-in-advertising statutes. In fact, some of their paid contributors are actually candidates themselves.

The Fox network is notorious for making false claims that misinform viewers and produce tangible harm. For instance, they spent weeks promoting heavily edited videos that defamed the community service organization, ACORN. They served as the PR agency for Tea Party interests and events. They disparaged health care reform as socialistic. During that debate a memo from Fox’s Washington managing editor instructed his staff to refrain from using the term “public option” because focus group testing had proven that “government-run” would produce a more negative response.

Even with routine reporting that is objectively factual, Fox purposely manipulated their broadcasts. They reported falsely that President Obama spent $2 billion on an overseas trade mission. They invented stories about the Department of Justice declining to prosecute civil rights cases if the plaintiff was white (and then failed to report that those allegations were proven false by an independent Congressional study). And on more than one occasion their anchor scripts and on-screen charts reversed the numbers for polling to show that the President, or the Democratic position, was disfavored by respondents when the actual poll result was the opposite.

To be clear, the FTC actions in the announcement above were taken in response to complaints levied about companies marketing acai berries for weight loss. But are the allegations really that different? If there is an institutional objection to fake news operations selling dubious nutritional products, wouldn’t it be even more critical to police fake news operations selling lies that could influence legislation and elections that impact millions of lives?

I don’t expect to see the FTC halting fake news operations like Fox any time soon. But it would be nice if they could prohibit the word “news” from being used in conjunction with such an operation. And if phony programs that misrepresent weight loss can be regulated to protect consumers, then why not phony programs that misrepresent news?


Glenn Beck’s Youth Bashing Crushed By Van Jones’ Optimism

Posted by on April 18, 2011 at 8:30 pm. NO Comments :

Glenn Beck has spent much of the past two years dismissing young people as ignorant, brainwashed, and/or “useful idiots.” He regards them as societal appendages whose obligation is to be obedient and silent. Most recently he blamed the uprisings in the Middle East on unruly kids led by Google executives and intent on forming alliances with western leftists and Al Qaeda to invoke Shariah law from Tripoli to Topeka.

Today Beck replayed old clips of Al Gore motivating young environmentalists by telling them that “There are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know.” That is objectively true for every new generation. If it were not it would mean that civilization is standing still. We are supposed to get smarter as time goes by. Aren’t we?

Not according to Beck. In Beck’s world Gore’s remarks are an appalling affront to parental authority. As is the speech that Van Jones gave at the Power Shift Conference for young leaders this past weekend. Beck played a short video of Jones encouraging members of the audience to be forthright in their advocacy for a clean environment. As usual, Beck cut the video so as to mislead his viewers. What he left was this snippet:

“When you go home, shift the power at the Thanksgiving table. When your Uncle Joe, who loves Fox News, starts talking to you and starts dominating the discussion.”

That’s where Beck cuts it off to insert his response:

“I will tell you this, in a side note. That is why I’m leaving this network. This network has this audience cornered. You are here because it is telling you the truth. We have got to get to the youth.”

First of all, that is not why Beck is leaving the network. He is leaving because he was fired for alienating over 300 advertisers and losing half of the audience. Secondly, Beck doesn’t explain what audience he alleges to have cornered, but presumably it is not the youth audience. In fact, Beck’s viewers, like Fox in general, skew older than any program on cable news. That aside, it is important to hear the rest of Jones’ thoughts to understand the depths of Beck’s intention to deceive. Just following the point where Beck cut the tape:

“When you go home, shift the power at the Thanksgiving table. When your Uncle Joe, who loves Fox News, starts talking to you and starts dominating the discussion, and starts making you feel small, and that your ideas don’t count, and that you’re some kind of bizarre freak, shift the power. Because this movement is not just for Democrats, and it’s not just for lefties. This movement is for everybody. And you have the opportunity to say to your Uncle Joe, ‘Excuse me sir. Don’t you believe in liberty? And if you do, how can you live in a country where every American is forced to be an energy consumer for the rest of our lives?

“Shouldn’t we have the right as Americans to be energy producers?’ Shouldn’t we be able to put up solar panels on our own houses? Shouldn’t we be able to put up wind turbines in our backyards? Shouldn’t we be able, as Americans, to power our own community? Shouldn’t we have the right and the liberty to be energy producers and not be dictated to twelve times a years by energy companies that dictate how much we’re gonna pay for energy, when we’re gonna pay it, how many asthma inhalers we’re gonna have as a consequence? Shouldn’t we have the liberty, as Americans, to power this country in a new way?”

Beck surely knows that the rest of that segment was entirely respectful toward Uncle Joe. He knows that there was no attempt to dishonor the role of parents or elders. He knows this yet he purposefully manipulates the message to cast young people in a negative light. And he has the gall to do this while declaring that he wants to “get to the youth.” That’s a goal he also spoke of in Albany on Saturday, where he said that he planned to build a way to deliver news directly to the youth of America. Does he plan to do that by frightening them as he does his radio and television audiences? Because that won’t work with this demographic. They are far more independent and self-directed. And for all the disrespect that Beck hurls at them, he cannot win them over with lies and fear mongering.

And just for the heck of it, here is Jones’ inspiring conclusion to the speech (which you can watch in full here):

“I love liberty. Given what’s happened with my ancestors, nobody loves liberty more than I do. But the pledge of allegiance doesn’t stop there. The pledge of allegiance says ‘liberty and justice for all.’ ‘Liberty and justice for all.’ And that’s what your movement is about. Liberty, yes, and justice. Justice for the immigrant. Justice for the lesbians and the gays. Justice for the African-Americans. Justice for women. Justice for the rural poor. Justice for the Native Americans. Liberty and justice for all. Shift the power!”


Bitches Brawl: Glenn Beck vs. Tucker Carlson

Posted by on April 18, 2011 at 12:33 pm. 3 Comments :

Glenn BeckA few weeks ago Tucker Carlson’s web site, The Daily Caller, ran the latest phony videos from scam artist James O’Keefe’s dishonest NPR sting. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Beck’s web site, The Blaze, took apart the videos revealing how deceptively they had been edited. This created a small schism in the right-wing media family.

Today that split has been wedged a little wider. TheDC published a lengthy article that accuses Beck of being a serial thief. He is shown to have appropriated the work of other conservative authors on multiple occasions so that it appears that he came up with the material himself. In some cases he went so far as to erase video logos from the originals in order to hide the source. Some of those whom Beck ripped off were vocally upset:

Andrew Breitbart, Big Journalism: “…sometimes he also uses other peoples’ work without crediting them, making it appear as though it were his own.”

Rebel Pundit: “You’ve got pretty much the biggest guy in the movement take your stuff and actually have his editors spend the time to scrub my name off of it.”

John Sexton, VerumSerum: “He’s used our stuff without any hat tip at all. I don’t understand that.”

Pamela Geller, AtlasShrugs: “I don’t know how to describe such outrageous and proud thievery. I like his work, but he’s a thief.”

Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media: “[Beck’s producers] told me Glenn wanted to handle the issue himself, which means he wanted to appear to be the expert.”

On his radio program this morning Beck and his crew escalated the conflict. They responded to the column in TheDC with a sarcastic reference to the article being an act of vengeance for the Blaze’s takedown on the NPR story:

Sidekick Stu: “Clearly there is no attempt at revenge to come up with a pathetic, horrible story about how Glenn steals from his own employees.”

Then Beck defends himself by saying that there are no original ideas – a justification that implies it’s OK to steal anything. He then proceeds to describe an item on The Blaze that has links to YouTube or some other source material. However, the complaints about Beck’s misappropriation were addressed to his television show, not his web site. And the TV show had no links or other attributions.

Previously Beck has been been called a plagiarist by the popular radio conspiracy guru, Alex Jones. Jones, who has called Beck a whore and a punk, has repeatedly lambasted Beck for stealing his research and twisting it to fit a rightist/GOP agenda.

It’s rather amusing that anyone would want to take credit for the garbage Beck spews, but pride of authorship extends even to nutcases who peddle insane conspiracy theories. If Beck rips them off they are entitled to their indignation. And the skirmishes that ensue ought to be entertaining for those of us in the reality-based world as right-wingers bark at each other. So have at it and may the craziest man win.

Update: Add Mike Huckabee to the list of those with whom Beck is feuding.