Sam Stein

Glenn Beck’s Cast Of Racists and White Supremacists

Posted by on November 16, 2009 at 4:57 pm. 9 Comments :

The case was made long ago that Fox News is a haven for racism and hate. So many of the network’s presenters have been caught expressing repulsive views that they should just stop pretending and pull their sheets out of the closet.

Let’s give Glenn Beck a taste of his own medicine. He revels in phony guilt by association scams, but he is also vulnerable to them. Sam Stein at the Huffington Post has done some investigative work that documents what rational observers already know. His column itemizes a parade of purported hate mongers that Beck has featured on his radio and TV programs. People like…

  • Michael Hill, the founder and president of the League of the South.
  • Thomas Naylor, the secessionist head of the Second Vermont Republic.
  • Tom Woods, radical, pro-Confederate author.
  • Larry Pratt, the president of Gun Owners of America.
  • Roy Beck, the founder and president of NumbersUSA.
  • Charles Goyette, Phoenix-based radio host and 9/11 skeptic.

The research done by HuffPo’s Stein is a useful addition to accumulated evidence against Beck. Stein notes that Beck is well known for casting aspersions on his enemies based on associations he can make between them and other dubious figures. By that standard, Beck is the leading candidate for Grand Wizard in America today. And remember, Beck is the guy who called President Obama a racist. Beck is also the guy who has been on an obsessive campaign against African Americans in public service. Along with organizations that represent the interests of the poor, minorities, and workers, like ACORN and SEIU, Beck has attacked mostly black staffers in the Obama administration:

Anyone who thinks that the election of a black president put an end to the problem of racial prejudice in this country is terminally naive.

The Goal Of The New York Post: Destroy Barack Obama

Posted by on November 11, 2009 at 9:21 am. NO Comments :

On the heels of reports that Rupert Murdoch’s sensationalistic tabloid, the New York Post, is severely wobbling financially and bleeding circulation, comes this report from the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein about a fired NY Post employee’s lawsuit against the paper.

Sandra Guzman was terminated by the Post after she had leveled criticism of an overtly racist cartoon that portrayed President Obama as a chimpanzee. Guzman’s allegations cover a broad sweep of misconduct by the paper and its editor, Col Allan. Stein writes…

“As part of the 38-page complaint, Guzman paints the Post newsroom as a male-dominated frat house and Allan in particular as sexist, offensive and domineering. Guzman alleges that she and others were routinely subjected to misogynistic behavior. She says that hiring practices at the paper — as well as her firing — were driven by racial prejudices rather than merit.

And she recounts the paper’s D.C. bureau chief stating that the publication’s goal was to ‘destroy [President] Barack Obama.’”

The lawsuit alleges that the environment at the Post was a hotbed of salacious innuendo, undisguised racism, and open political partisanship. Read Stein’s article for the juicy details. He has also posted a copy of the full complaint.

This is just another embarrassing episode for the Murdoch family of pseudo-news operations, and should further lock in Murdoch’s legacy as a disreputable purveyor of filth and lies.

Bill O’Reilly: MoveOn Forced CNBC To Hire Howard Dean

Posted by on March 29, 2009 at 7:47 pm. NO Comments :

Bill O’Reilly gets funnier by the day (or scarier, depending on your perspective). His latest broadcast falsehood is that MoveOn.org has wielded its mighty power to “force” NBC/Universal CEO Jeff Zucker to hire Howard Dean as a contributor to CNBC. This display of domination was allegedly in response to conservative commentaries by CNBC’s Jim Cramer and Mark Haines.

Even if someone was stupid enough to believe that a relatively small political activist group could boss around the chief of a major entertainment and news empire, the accusation is completely without foundation. In fact, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, who did some actual reporting, unlike O’Reilly, found that:

“…the decision to bring the recently departed DNC Chair on board, the source says, was finalized well before the current wave of CNBC-angst. So while grassroots groups have sprouted up in recent weeks petitioning the network to make wholesale changes, Dean’s hiring can’t be viewed as a direct result of public pressure.”

O’Reilly’s stupidity, however, extends even further. The source he quotes for his baseless and false allegation is Noel Sheppard. O’Reilly identifies him as the author of a column in the Washington Examiner. What O’Reilly doesn’t tell you is that Sheppard also happens to be the Associate Editor of NewsBusters, an arm of the uber-conservative Media Research Center. The MRC was just revealed to be the source for many ideologically twisted stories on Fox News, a fact that former anchor Brit Hume confessed just last week. Now O’Reilly has admitted that he too is disseminating MRC propaganda as if it were news. It should be noted that neither O’Reilly nor Sheppard produced any evidence that either MoveOn or Zucker played any role in Dean’s employment.

As if that were not enough, O’Reilly went on to disparage Dean saying that he “know[s] little about economics.” Where O’Reilly gets the gumption to knock Dean’s credentials is beyond me. Dean served as governor of the state of Vermont for twelve years. For a portion of time he was Chairman of the National Governor’s Association. Prior to that he was a Wall Street stock broker. And his father was a top executive at Dean Witter Reynolds. But O’Reilly, who expounds on economics every day is a former tabloid TV news reader. So on whose advice would you prefer to rely?

On the comedy tip, O’Reilly is even having trouble organizing his outrage. For years he has been hammering NBC and its cable units as being irredeemably compromised by wicked leftists. He reveled in characterizing them as despicable purveyors of group-think. The following quotation, however, reveals a psyche that is sorely starving for air.

“Now many on Wall Street believe Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric which owns NBC, has completely lost control of his company, including the actions of Mr. Zucker. The evidence of that is that MSNBC is supporting and promoting the same far-left loons that are hammering the sister outfit CNBC. I mean, how rich is this?”

First of all, the “many on Wall Street believe” canard is an example of a lazy intellect. O’Reilly won’t, and can’t identify these imaginary critics. Secondly, his complaint that MSNBC is critical of CNBC contradicts his contention that all NBC units think alike. Even worse, by mocking this diversity of opinion, he is implying that he would prefer it if they did think alike. Of course, he would prefer no such thing. He would simply go back to accusing them of being blindly and uniformly liberal. It’s the O’Reilly way