FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Beck’s hire signaled to the network’s base and the country at large the direction Fox would take as a reaction to Obama’s election. Eight years later, after a very different election result, at a different moment for the country and the network, Fox is once again signaling its priorities to an incoming administration
“I played a role…in helping tear the country apart,” Glenn Beck says. Indeed–not just from his time at Fox, but from years of talk radio broadcasts, and a stint at CNN’s Headline News–not to mention his work at his current outlet, The Blaze.
Today the New York Times (4/3/12) has a long report detailing how the Obama White House has politicized the regulatory process, apparently partly out of a fear of being portrayed by Republicans as “an overzealous and job-killing regulator.” It’s an interesting piece, covering an array of regulatory decisions. One of the more interesting media anecdotes […]
Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the “middle,” but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is […]
Fox‘s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has often looked and sounded like Glenn Beck were still working there. On Friday’s broadcast of the O’Reilly Factor (10/14/11), Beck was there to show how wild conspiracy-mongering is done: O’REILLY: What’s the George Soros factor here? BECK: George Soros is connected with this through the Tides […]
That might explain the piece the wire service ran today, under the headline, “Who’s Behind the Wall Street Protests?” Reporters Mark Egan and Michelle Nichols suggest that Glenn Beck’s demented chalkboard scribbles might have actually been on the right track; the protests “may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest […]
It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O’Reilly channeling Beck’s Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard: On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren’t exactly sure. What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are […]
Glenn Beck (7/25/11, via Mediaite, 7/25/11) explains on his radio show why the right-wing Norway terror suspect is what we call left-wing here in America: This was one of the episodes where I showed the railroad tracks that were different than America. In America, the left railroad track is gigantic government—it could be Communist or […]
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank seems to like to mock progressives almost as much as he likes to go after Glenn Beck. So it’s no surprise that he turned out to “cover” the unveiling of a budget plan by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (4/13/11). Milbank seems to think that little explanation is needed—these crazy ideas […]
From David Carr‘s piece on Glenn Beck in the New York Times today (3/7/11): “When I first came here,” he told his audience on Wednesday, “I had this pie-in-the-sky belief that if I told you the truth, if I verified all of my facts and double-checked, and we could make that compelling case with facts […]
It is bizarre to see Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly denying that pundits from her network compare people to Nazis—contrasting this reticence to Rep. Steve Cohen (D.-Tenn.), who said calling healthcare reform a “government takeover of healthcare” was “a big lie. Just like Goebbels.” In fact, such comparisons are common currency on Fox News and […]
In addition to his repeated murder fantasies, Glenn Beck harbors apocalyptic fantasies of mass death–suggesting, for instance, that if the direction of the country doesn’t change, “God will wash this nation with blood.” (Barack Obama, are you listening?) But the Fox News host harbors many deranged obsessions. He has long obsessed over Frances Fox Piven, […]
Glenn Beck has expressed on-air desires to strangle Michael Moore with his own hands, beat Charles Rangel to death with a shovel, and once aired a sketch on his Fox News show that had him poisoning then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Appearing on the Today show this morning (1/19/11), responding to questions about his […]
Earlier this week (1/10/11) I wrote, given how short corporate media’s memories are, “Let’s hope that when someone convenes a civility in media discussion in 2020, they don’t ask Glenn Beck to weigh in.” No need to wait that long. Time magazine has convened a panel to talk about civility in our public discourse. And […]
Right-wing pundits have come out vociferously against the idea that they, their colleagues and the political movement they identify with have anything to answer for in the wake of the Tucson massacre. David Brooks (New York Times, 1/11/11) asserted that “the evidence before us suggests that [shooting suspect Jared] Loughner was locked in a world […]
Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson writes an important column today (1/12/11) about right-wing rhetoric and the Tucson shootings. Meyerson’s point is that discussing certain symbols–like the Sarah Palin “cross hairs” map–makes little sense without understanding the paranoid worldview that is advanced by right-wing leaders and commentators like Glenn Beck. When folks like Beck and Erick […]
Last Wednesday (Glenn Beck Program, 11/10/10), we got a glimpse of how low Glenn Beck will go to smear a political opponent. Beck’s lie that philanthropist George Soros helped “send the Jews to the death camps” during World War II, was, in essence, an attack on a Jewish child for the heartbreaking things he was […]
Bill O’Reilly‘s recent “joke” about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview. During the cable channel’s 2008 election coverage, in […]
Fox News must be a funny place to work. The biggest star there is constantly talking about how the Obama administration is leading us toward tyranny, slavery and dictatorship. Meanwhile, on the FoxNews.com website (10/25/10), you’ve got “frequent contributor” and Bush State Department alum Christian Whiton (you couldn’t make these names up) complaining bitterly that […]
CNN president JonKlein is out–replaced byKen Jautz, who was theboss at Headline News. He is, among other things, the guy who brought Glenn Beck to television: CNN‘s Headline News has hired radio talkshow host Glenn Beck to host a one-hour primetime show, according to a Daily Variety report (1/17/06). Variety quotes CNN Headline News president […]
