Glenn McCarthy Beck – Take Action

In a perverse twist of reality, Glenn Beck now seeks to claim victim status from the progressive response to his false and malicious “reporting.” On his radio show on Tuesday, Beck compared Fox News to the Jews persecuted in the Holocaust.  It almost seems like Beck hijacked our earlier post about the Democrats’ response to his efforts to remove Obama Administration officials one-by-one.

I’m sorry Glenn, but the bully doesn’t get to play the victim card when people start standing up to him.

(re-posted from Media Matters)

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post
by James Rucker

Our campaign to hold Glenn Beck accountable for his race-baiting and fear-mongering has been a great success, with 62 advertisers making it clear that they don’t want their brands linked to Beck’s vile rhetoric. Up until now, however, there’s been a question of what the real consequences are for Beck and for Fox, especially as Beck’s ratings have soared. It’s starting to become clear.

Today, we’re announcing that Glenn Beck’s show has lost over 50% of its advertising dollars since just before our campaign started. From our press release about the news:

The advertising boycott of Glenn Beck has cost the controversial host over half of his estimated advertising revenue since it was launched by ColorOfChange.org a month ago. This according to data analyzed from industry sources.

Estimated advertising revenue [the total amount of advertising money being spent during a block of commercial time for a program] was collected on a week-by-week basis for a period of two months. According to the data collected, the amount of money spent by national advertisers on Beck’s program per week was at its highest at approximately $1,060,000, for the week ending August 2, 2009. ColorOfChange.org launched their campaign at the end of that week and since then, 62 advertisers have distanced themselves from Beck. Data collected for the week ending September 6, 2009 shows Beck’s estimated ad revenue at $492,000, equal to a loss of $568,000.

“Fox News Channel has consistently claimed they haven’t lost revenue as advertisers abandon Glenn Beck, but the numbers prove otherwise,” said James Rucker, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.org. “Fox News Channel has a limited amount of ad positions. If 62 companies refuse to run ads on two of their 24 hours of programming, they are losing inventory. No matter how high Beck’s ratings have been lately, advertisers still see Beck as toxic and don’t want him associated with their brands. There is no way that Fox News Channel is making the money they should be making with Glenn Beck.”

Our campaign is working. Respectable companies don’t want to be associated with Beck or support his show with their dollars. It’s resulting in a major loss of funding for his show, and at the same time making it clear that Beck’s race-baiting and fear-mongering are far outside the mainstream.

The longer Beck stays isolated, the more of a problem he’ll be for Fox, and the less he’ll be able to spread his lies and distortions. If we can keep the pressure on, Fox will have to make a choice: 1) drop Beck because it doesn’t make business sense to keep him; or 2) communicate to the world that they’re so intent on providing a platform for race-baiting and fear-mongering that they don’t care if they lose money (a serious problem for a public company like News Corporation, the owner of Fox).

Thanks for everything you’ve done to make this effort a success — none of it could have happened without the more than 200,000 of you who have stepped to be a part of this campaign. More than ever, it’s time to keep the pressure on. You can help by joining us in thanking the advertisers that have stopped supporting Glenn Beck, and calling on those whose ads are still running on his show to follow suit.

While Glenn Beck was the most vocal and visible attack dog working to bring down Van Jones, this has been part of a right-wing effort to destroy the Obama Administration by painting them as communist radicals. From Kevin Gradia on the Huffington Post:

You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that Glenn Beck wasn’t the mastermind behind the campaign to remove Van Jones from his position as the head of the White House Council on Envrionmental Quality… that would be giving Beck way too much credit.

Turns out that the attack was orchestrated by a fringe group of free-marketeers called the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) who describe themselves as “grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels.” You can read a complete backgrounder on AFP here. It suffices to say they get a lot of money from some of the biggest players in the right-wing attack machine…

We also know that their strategy moving forward will be to frame green jobs and the clean energy bill as a radical socialist plot.

From The Reid Report:

Jones, it seems, wasn’t pushed out by Glenn Beck. Beck was just the vehicle. The real pushers were anti-climate change advocates from, wait for it, the oil industry. From this DU post, which identified Phil Kerpen from “Americans for Prosperity” as the man “who started it all.” Apparently, he even bragged about his role on Fox News yesterday, and also issued the following boast on his website:

How Van Jones Happened and What We Need to Do Next

Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through with two critical policy victories. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions, and second repeal the unspent portion of the stimulus bill, which stands to give them billions.

The Van Jones affair could be an important turning point in the Obama administration if we use it as a window to understand the structure of the left and to stop the huge power-grab now taking place in the name of green jobs.

AFP, and its former incarnation the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, are the third largest recipient of funding from the Koch Family of Foundations, which is run by the ultra-conservative oil baron Charles G. Koch. The Koch Family of Foundations has been a major funding source for many of the think tanks that are in the business of delaying action on climate change issues.

Americans for Prosperity is also the group that sent buses around the country to town hall dust-ups, where its speakers compared healthcare reform to the Holocaust, and its proponents hung members of Congress in effigy (they’re also connected to the Jack Abramoff web of intrigue and tangentially, to the birthers) but their main issue is climate change — or rather climate change denial, for the purposes of stopping any reform that would cost its financial benefactors money.

Even further, Enviroknow obtained two documents from AFP outlining the “Green Jobs Radical Network.”

Both documents place Van Jones near the center of this so-called radical network. Other prominent individuals in the environmental and progressive movements mentioned in the documents include Stephen Chu, John Podesta, John Holdren, Jason Grumet, Bracken Hendricks, Robert Borosage, Carl Pope and Andy Stern, among others.

So what does this all mean?  The effort to oust Van Jones was funded and led by an organization dedicated to preventing any progress on clean energy and to discredit the environmental movement as a whole.  AFP funds McCarthy-esque scare tactics, AFP does the muck-raking, AFP feeds the material to Glenn Beck who proceeds to add his own racist spin on the issue.  Wonderful, Beck is serving as the mouthpiece for fringe conservative organizations and calling it reporting.

This is not reporting.  It is spreading corporate PR.

I can’t help but be reminded of the famous quote from Ghandi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”  It won’t be easy, but we need to keep fighting.

Call it how it is.  It’s one thing to dig up information to act as a watchdog on the government.  It’s an entirely different thing to fabricate lies about government officials (Van Jones is not a convict), encourage intimidation of Congressmen (burning effigies outside of healthcare town halls) and act on behalf of corporate funders (AFP) as Glenn Beck has done.  And of course, the mainstream media is almost silent over this outrageous breach in journalistic integrity.

So speak up.  Don’t let this story fade – it is part of a pattern that needs to be stopped.

In the week before Van Jones’ departure from the White House, the White House was ominously silent in its support for Jones.  Additionally, most of the major environmental organizations, who had supported Jones’ work and appointment to the White House seemed dumbstruck on to how to respond to attacks, so didn’t.  It was only this morning, over a day after Jones resigned that Green For All, the organization he founded and lead just prior to working for the Obama Administration, sent an announcement to their supporters with the news.  Other organizations have been slower to respond.

While I believe this was a strategic mistake on the part of the White House (allowing the right-wing media to smear members of the Administration one-by-one), the Obama Administration should not waste precious time and political capital debunking Glenn Beck’s lies.  Instead, their role in this is to instill confidence in Administration officials’ competence (which they certainly did not do).

As a result, the responsibility to tackle smear campaigns like this rests with the media (to debunk lies), other members of the Democratic Party (to provide support for the Obama Administration) and civic organizations (to articulate the vision of Van’s work).  But there was no coordinated progressive response to dismantling the smear tactics coming from the extreme right and magnified through the media. Given the vast silence on the Left is it any surprise that the attacks worked in turning public opinion against Van Jones?

Yesterday Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, wrote a response to Jones’ departure titled “We Blew It”, in which he takes some amount of responsibility for the lack of vocal support for Jones.

When I saw the first Glenn Beck piece on Van Jones and the Apollo Alliance as the new vast left-wing conspiracy, I could not take it seriously. Silence enabled Fox to keep pushing…I assumed it would blow over.

Well, that was a mistake. So was the decision by the White House to treat the initial attacks not as part of an assault on the president but, instead, to allow them to be viewed as being about Van Jones…

It was organized by the Republicans as part of a conscious strategy, and it is only the first. We should be critical of ourselves for having blown this one. But we shouldn’t forgive either ourselves or the Administration if the next time we sense this happening we don’t fight back harder, faster, and in a way that calls a mob a mob, racism racism, and an attack on the president an attack on America.

I appreciate Carl Pope’s sentiment, and hopefully he and the rest of our movement has learned that silence doesn’t make a problem go away.  Just because the Left won an election does not mean making progress will be easy.  The extreme Right is committed to preventing the Obama Administration from making changes this country desperately needs and will to resort to hateful and dishonest tactics to see that happen.

And now that they have tasted victory, Beck and others have turned to his new targets: Cass Sunstein, Mark Llyod and Carol Browner. Problems don’t disappear by covering our eyes; diseases don’t go away by ignoring them.  As David Robert’s of Grist writes, “Our civic immune system has grown weak. There are no filters, no longer shared standards of evidence, truth, or decency.  The poison courses unhindered through the body. Nothing, no matter how factually insane or morally repugnant, can be repelled.”

What we need now is for the people of this country (media, organizational leaders, and most importantly individuals) to refuse to accept false and hateful speech to masquerade as reporting.  We need all those people to make it unacceptable to profit from such statements.

Speak up.

Emily Gertz at Change.org writes:

It was about how some Republican legislators took advantage of Beck’s well-distributed crazy to hassle and distract the Obama administration — enough to ultimately set back energy, economic, and climate policy reforms.

And it’s about the administration’s outsized sensitivity and suprise at this sort of clamor from a small (if vocal) portion of the electorate — and its avatars — that will not be swayed by reason or truth…

These particular legislators seem impervious to facts — as my Grist colleague Dave Roberts puts it, this is all about “bitch-slap politics.” But they are weak when it comes to increased public scrutiny, to craving approval, and ultimately, if the Democrats can get it together, to being rendered largely irrelevant in energy and climate policy reform.

These are the people who climate action advocates will focus on — bluntly, directly and aggressively — if they want to win.

If they want to lose, they’ll focus on Glenn Beck.

David Sassoon at SolveClimate.org writes:

The White House is now on the defensive, protecting Jones and his effective work promoting green jobs, but no matter the outcome, Murdoch and his News Corp. brand are in a vulnerable position. When the dust settles on Pennsylvania Avenue, Murdoch will still have to contend with the Color of Change campaign…For now, Murdoch is making a short-term buck on Beck’s race-baiting. Longer-term, it’s a losing corporate strategy. The color of demographic change is trending darker, and companies will be forced to be sensitive not to offend their own workforce or their customers by supporting race-baiting speech with advertising dollars.

That’s Murdoch’s bread and butter, and Beck’s attack on Jones to protect his own revenue stream has only amplified the success of the ad boycott and has really let the genie out of the bottle.

David Roberts at Grist writes:

Our civic immune system has grown weak. There are no filters, no longer shared standards of evidence, truth, or decency.  The poison courses unhindered through the body. Nothing, no matter how factually insane or morally repugnant, can be repelled.

Like I said, Beck’s more greasy huckster than true believer. He went after Jones to get revenge on Color of Change, a group Jones co-founded, for targeting his advertisers (which are dropping like flies). Rupert Murdoch will only put up with the stench as long as money’s coming in.

But make no mistake, it’s racial resentment that blew this story up. The worst outcome of all this is that it will validate Beck and his long history of paranoid conspiracy theories and repugnant allegations. It will be like chum in the water, almost as invigorating to the crazies as bagging Dan Rather. Much, much more ugliness will ensue, and it will become that much harder to focus on the multiple crises converging on the country.

Brad Johnson of Think Progress writes:

On Tuesday night, Glenn Beck invoked the red-baiting of a bygone age, making the claim that there are “Communists in the United States government.” Beck’s McCarthyite rampage came during an extended screed attacking White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs Van Jones, a former Center for American Progress senior fellow and the co-founder of Green for All, an environmental-entrepeneurial organization…

Evidently, Beck is attacking Van Jones to divert attention from his accusations that President Obama is a “racist” who “hates white people.” A successful boycott by Color of Change, an organization co-founded by Van Jones in 2005 but with which he has had no active involvement since 2007, has led to 57 advertisers abandoning Beck’s show.

Gillian Caldwell of 1Sky writes:

What does this mean? …

More lynchings – Van’s is just the first scalp and they wont stop there. But what they didn’t bet on is that he can and will be even more effective on the outside than he was able to be on the inside — particularly now that they have launched him to a position of national prominence and interest with this lynching. As others have pointed out, Van’s resignation could mean it will be impossible for outspoken progressives to work in the White House, which would be a very bad result for the country.