Sunday, April 10, 2011

why glenn beck's ghetto pass was revoked...,

Video - Glenn Beck hosts G. Edward Griffin on the Fed.

WaPo |On Friday, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.8 percent, as businesses added jobs for the 13th straight month.

On Wednesday, Fox News announced that it was ending Glenn Beck’s daily cable-TV show

These are not unrelated events.

When Beck’s show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck’s angry broadcasts about the nation’s imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

But as the recession began to ease, Beck’s apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience began to drift away. Beck responded with a doubling-down that ultimately brought about his demise on Fox.

He pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down. He spun a conspiracy theory in which the American left was in cahoots with an emerging caliphate in the Middle East. And, most ominously, he began to traffic regularly in anti-Semitic themes.

This vile turn for Beck reached its logical extreme two weeks ago, when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what is happening in our world today.”

Griffin’s Web site dabbles in a variety of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including his view that “present-day political Zionists are promoting the New World Order.”

A month earlier, Beck, on his radio program, had described Reform rabbis as “generally political in nature,” adding: “It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way.”

A few months before that, he had attacked the Jewish billionaire George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a “puppet master” and read descriptions of him as an “unscrupulous profiteer” who “sucks the blood from people.” Beck falsely called Soros “a collaborator” with Nazis who “saw people into the gas chambers.”

Fox deserves credit for finally putting an end to this. Its joint statement with Beck’s production company, claiming that they will “work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects,” is almost certainly window-dressing; you can be confident Fox won’t have Beck reopening what his Fox News colleague Shepard Smith dubbed the “fear chamber.”

In banishing Beck, about whom I wrote a critical book last year, Fox has made an important distinction: It’s one thing to promote partisan journalism, but it’s entirely different to engage in race baiting and fringe conspiracy claims. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity may have their excesses, but their mainstream conservatism is in an entirely different category from Beck.

Fox has rightly, if belatedly, declared that there is no place for Beck’s messages on its airwaves, and Beck will return to the fringes, where such ideas have always existed. Because his end-of-the-world themes will no longer be broadcast by a mainstream outlet, there will be less of a chance for him to inspire off-balance characters to violence.

6 comments:

Tom said...

Fine as far as it goes. But when is the majority population going to experience the epiphany that people who scapegoat any minority are dangerous freaks? We have to wait and wait and wait until they finally lose it & go after Jewish folks, and then we all go, omg, what a dangerous freak? What happens when one of these freaks learns the lesson and leaves that one group alone?

Tom said...

CNu, I was reacting to the WaPo piece. I didn't view the Beck video or read the PCR/LR piece, but I'll hold my nose and do 'em. I've run into PCR and LR reading up on finance; they tend to make good sense for a few paragraphs, better sense than the mainstream sometimes, and then just when I'm thinking they're ok, they go bananas and spout all kinds of nonsense.

Let you know when I've done my assignment, Prof!

Tom said...

Ohhhh, no, he didn't sink his teeth into the Fed's ankle on prime time television, did he?

CNu said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS4X5_-OAE8

nanakwame said...

I am with you. I feel at my age as if I am in surrealism, where what needs to be born has been aborted over and over again for over 30 years, and we have the usual suspect spinning around and around till they die. There are good books by African writers who use the mythpoetic of the abiku as a metaphor for societies in Africa, it applies to us here too. Yet now the rubber hits the road, and anymore aborts will be near open fascists. Pray Doc doesn't call Bob Avakian name.

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