Glenn Beck duped Americans

Here are today's news items from Media Matters for America, click on the title or 'read more' to read the entirety of each story.

Fox's "Straight News" Campaigns For Estate Tax Repeal
While guest hosting Fox's "straight news" program, Special Report, Shannon Bream did a report suggesting that the estate tax hurts small businesses and therefore causes the economy to hemorrhage jobs. But the report failed to mention that a vanishingly small number of businesses and individuals are subject to the estate tax. Read More

Lila Rose Pushes Falsehood That Abortion Is How Indiana Planned Parenthood "Makes Money"
Appearing on Fox News to push her most recent attack on Planned Parenthood, Lila Rose claimed that abortions are how Planned Parenthood of Indiana "makes money." In fact, abortions account for only an estimated 16 percent of its total annual revenue in 2010. Read More

Seeing Red: After Decrying Communist Name-Calling, Beck Repeatedly Smeared His Opponents As Communists
In a January 2009 promo for his Fox News show shortly before it debuted, Glenn Beck claimed that he was "tired of the politics of left and right. It's about right and wrong. We argue back and forth -- 'If you haven't voted for the donkey, you're just a hatemonger.' The other side -- 'Oh, those donkeys trying to turn us into communist Russia.' Stop!" But despite this professed disgust with communist name-calling, Beck proceeded to use his Fox News show to relentlessly smear people and groups as Communists, Marxists, and Socialists. Read More

Glenn Beck's Top 5 Moments Invoking Violence As A Response To "Progressives"
Glenn Beck's tenure at Fox News was marked by exceedingly violent rhetoric as he obsessively invoked violence as a possible response to "progressives." Here are five of the worst examples. Read More

Beck's Golden Ticket: Gold Sellers Stayed Loyal While Other Advertisers Fled
Even as scores of advertisers abandoned Glenn Beck's Fox News show, it continued to attract sellers of gold and other precious metals. Meanwhile, Beck used his show to tout gold ownership as a way to "be prepared." Read More

Glenn Beck's Top 5 Failed Predictions
Glenn Beck has claimed: "I have been given the gift, the blessing, or the curse" to see "slightly over the horizon" and said that on his "big predictions, we have about a 90 percent accuracy rate." But Beck's ability to see "slightly over the horizon" certainly isn't a gift, given how wrong his bizarre predictions often are. With that said, Media Matters presents the top five failed Beck predictions from his time on Fox News. Read More

Glenn Beck's Top 5 Worst Smears
In more than two years on Fox News, Glenn Beck has repeatedly smeared those with which he disagrees. Media Matters presents a selection of Beck's worst smears. Read More

"They Think You're Stupid": Glenn Beck's Manipulation Of His Audience
Glenn Beck frequently pitted his Fox News audience against his foes, telling his viewers that progressives and the media "think you're stupid." Beck also praised his viewers' intelligence while attempting to sell them on his theories, claiming that his audience "will change the course of a nation." Read More

The 50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said On Fox News
In light of Glenn Beck's transition from Fox News, Media Matters for America recalls the 50 worst things Beck has said on Fox. Read More

Glenn Beck's Perpetual Self-Promotion Machine
Throughout his career on Fox News, Glenn Beck shamelessly used the platform to promote a variety of his own ventures outside Fox News. Both on his own show and in guest appearances on other shows, Beck promoted his books, tours, subscriber-only Web content, and the Restoring Honor and Restoring Courage rallies. Read More

Adopting GOP Talking Point, Fox Claims That Obama Wasn't Involved In Default Crisis Talks
Following President Obama's Wednesday press conference in which he chided Congress for failing to resolve the default crisis, Fox News immediately began echoing the GOP's bogus attack that the president has been "AWOL" or disengaged from the debate over solving the default crisis. In fact, President Obama has been involved from the beginning and has repeatedly met with members of Congress from both parties to negotiate a solution. Read More

Glenn Beck's Obsession With Slavery
In the past two years, Glenn Beck has repeatedly invoked slavery to attack President Obama, progressives, and progressive policies, among other things. Here is a sampling. Read More

Glenn Beck's Top 5 Least Credible Sources
During his time at Fox News, Glenn Beck regularly turned to disreputable sources to back-up his wild and unfounded conspiracy theories. Here are five of Beck's least credible sources. Read More

Parents Shouldn't Trust Beck To Educate Their Kids
Glenn Beck has said he is leaving Fox News in part to "target the youth" and pitch his distinctive brand of right-wing misinformation to a younger demographic. But Beck's long history of misleading his viewers demonstrates why no one should trust him to educate his or her children. Read More

The Glenn Beck Shopping Network
Glenn Beck leaves behind a dubious ethical legacy: On his Fox show, he would promote companies with which he had a financial relationship, but without disclosing that relationship to his viewers. He also used the program as a forum to nudge viewers toward buying products like gold and a library's worth of books. Read More

Glenn Beck's Top 5 Most Inflammatory Moments
In more than two years on Fox News, Glenn Beck inundated his viewers with violent, inflammatory rhetoric. Media Matters presents a selection of his worst offenses. Read More

Conservative Media Shout "Class Warfare" To Defend Tax Breaks On Corporate Jets
The right-wing media responded with outrage after President Obama called on Congress to eliminate tax breaks on corporate jets in order to help stave off a default crisis -- accusing Obama of waging "class warfare." Read More

The road not taken by the Media

The road not taken
Mike Ghouse

http://interjunction.org/article/the-road-not-taken/

Could the Iraq war have been prevented had the American media asked the right questions? How do conservative media commentators frame the actions of different religious communities? Does the media pay due attention to history? Mike Ghouse reflects on the political impact of mainstream media decisions.

INCREASINGLY FOCUSED ON competitiveness and profits, the mainstream American media is under pressure for its own survival. Indeed, it is at a critical juncture of having to choose between fulfilling its societal responsibility or succumbing to the political compulsions of our times. As a society we need to evaluate the importance of the media in our American system of governance. Does it still play the crucial role the founding fathers of our nation had envisioned for it?

Thomas Jefferson made a strong statement about the role of the media in a democracy when he noted, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Describing the role of the press, George A. Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services and co-author of Hold the Press, writes, “In the wake of America’s successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public ‘watchdog’ was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business.”

Could one say that the government in the United States was kept out of the news business in the past, but not any more?

In the recent past, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told host Howard Kurtz that the Bush administration had “the right” to pay a columnist to tout its views in his column. As this article notes, Kurtz spoke of the “Pentagon planting positive stories, in some cases paying for positive stories in Iraqi newspapers.” The administration also paid journalist Armstrong Williams to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy. The Government Accountability Office, however, determined that the Bush Administration was wrong in promoting its educational policy through Armstrong’s column.

The essence of democracy is the ability to question everything in fairness and without worrying about censure against such inquiry. How many journalists from the mainstream media have failed this test in recent times? Let us examine a few situations and see the specific failures of the American media in each case.

The qualities of a commander-in-chief

As we speak, the airwaves are saturated with coverage of the presidential nominees in both parties. Why aren’t journalists questioning the rhetoric from McCain and Clinton that they are fit to be the commander-in-chief of the nation? We are a democracy, and it is not essential that our government should be run by a military expert. That was not the intent of our system.

I do not expect my president to be an expert in nuclear, biological, botanical, or other sciences and certainly not a military expert. I want a judicious person who can call on real experts as the situation demands and make the right decision in each case.

Journalists can still ask the candidates this question. Will they?

Precedent and patterns in the Rev. Wright controversy

The second week of March 2008 witnessed relentless coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, “God Damn America,” in the American media. It was all one could hear on the cable channels. The pundits were suggesting that this might indicate the end of presidential candiate Barack Obama’s political aspirations, given that Wright was Obama’s pastor.

In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ralph Luker pointed out that “the quotation comes not from Wright, but from the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Both African-American preachers have understood prophetic biblical preaching far better than those who feign shock at and condemn Wright’s words.”

“Obama’s Minister ‘Hates America’ But When My Father Said the Same Sort of Things He Became a Hero To The Republicans” wrote Frank Schaeffer in the OpEdNews. Schaeffer quoted his father, religious right leader, Francis Schaeffer, expressing similar sentiments. “Take Dad’s words” Frank Schaeffer went on to say, “and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet, when we the white Religious Right denounced America, the white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words ‘godly’ and ‘prophetic’ and a ‘call to repentance.’”

The mainstream media largely failed to investigate if there was a precedent, if some one else had used this kind of language, if the reaction had been different, and why that might have been the case.

The burning of the US embassy in Kosovo

While driving around on Friday, February 22 earlier this year, I listened to every news channel. Our embassy was torched in Kosovo by radicals on that day. The media did not describe the violence as religiously motivated nor name any religious community as the culprit. I believe that was the right approach on the part of the media.

But I wondered: had those radicals been Muslims, what kind of demonization would mainstream conservative commentators like O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh have engaged in?

The war in Iraq

As the Bill Moyers Journal’s special edition program, “Buying the War,” compellingly demonstrated, the mainstream American media uncritically accepted the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and his links to Al-Qaeda. The five chapter report speaks for itself.

Had the media stood their ground, perhaps our administration would not have engaged in policies that have resulted in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis as per the figures provided by the medical journal Lancet estimate, 4,000 of our men and women, and a cost of anywhere from 1 to 2 trillion dollars.

Was their inability to ask the right questions of the administration not a colossal blunder on the part of the mainstream media?

Mike Ghouse is a writer and activist based in Dallas. He runs the blogs Foundation for Pluralism and World Muslim Congress.

Global Media Manupulation

Global Media Managers
http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker15.html
by Michael Barker

(Swans - March 9, 2009) On January 13, 2009, the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), a recently formed international media manipulator, released a report titled, "Soft Censorship: How Governments Around the Globe Use Money to Manipulate the Media." The report documents the manner in which various governments manipulate media systems within their own countries (e.g., the Ukraine and Chile). Significantly the report fails to identify the US government's extensive efforts to manipulation of media systems in those same countries or the conduct of CIMA itself. When it is revealed that CIMA is a project of the US government's CIA-inspired National Endowment for Democracy (NED) this failure is contextualised. For example, by providing strategic support to local media projects the NED played a key role in facilitating Ukraine's Orange Revolution (in 2005), and in catalysing the ouster of Chile's resident dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1987. (1)

The first sentence of the executive summary of CIMA's report notes, without irony, that: "As once openly authoritarian regimes have moved toward more democratic societies -- or at least toward the appearance of democratic ones -- an insidious form of censorship has arisen." Such a statement expresses the anti-democratic function of the media in the United States itself. (2) That is, the media empire in the U.S. operates to bring pressures upon mainstream US journalists to self-censor and conform to capitalist ideology. Such pressure facilitates the transition from pseudo democratic forms of governance to openly authoritarian (media-backed) regimes.

This short article does not critique the content of CIMA's latest report; however, it is necessary to point out that almost all of the "independent" media groups referred to within the report have secured support from the National Endowment for Democracy at some point of their operations. (3) Instead this article scrutinizes a number of rarely mentioned democracy-manipulators whose work can be indirectly connected to Don Podesta, the author of the CIMA report. The point of this scrutiny is to demonstrate how deeply such media manipulators have insinuated themselves into global civil society, so that concerned activists can more effectively resist their hegemonic influence.

Don Podesta presently serves as consultant to CIMA. Prior to his engagement as consultant he served as a board member of the Inter American Press Association, and acted as "an assistant managing editor/copy desks at The Washington Post, where he worked for 27 years." His ties to the Inter American Press Association help explain his current role as consultant, as in earlier years this association had formed an alliance with the corporate media to help oust the Allende government in Chile in 1973. More recently the Inter American Press Association has acted in a similar fashion against President Chávez in Venezuela. An understanding of this background makes it relevant that The Washington Post's deputy managing editor, Milton Coleman, served alongside Podesta, until recently, on the board of the Inter American Press Association -- a group that might be considered to be just one of many CIMA precursors.

Given that both Podesta and Coleman have ties to The Washington Post an examination of other links that The Washington Post Company has to various philanthropic media manipulators is informative. This is because the long serving vice president of the Washington Post Company, Patrick Butler, also currently serves on CIMA's advisory council. In addition, two other board members of the Washington Post Company are affiliated to important democracy-manipulating media ventures: these are the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett (who serves on the advisory board of the International Center for Journalists -- a group that in turn obtains funding from the National Endowment for Democracy), and the former president and publisher of Akron Beacon-Journal, John Dotson, Jr. (who serves on the journalism advisory committee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation).

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (also known as the Knight Foundation), is a major supporter of seemingly "independent" media projects, and was created in 1940 with monies generated from the Akron Beacon Journal. Since 2005, the president and CEO of the foundation has been Alberto Ibarguen, the former publisher of The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald. Ibarguen maintains impressive democracy-manipulating credentials, as he is a US member of the imperialist Inter-American Dialogue, board member of the CIA-linked Council on Foreign Relations, and has held high-level appointments within a number of media-manipulating groups like the Freedom Forum's Newseum, and the Inter American Press Association. Ibarguen, however, is a board member of the newly formed and ostensibly progressive investigative journalism project, Pro Publica -- for a critique of this organization's work see "Investigating the Investigators: A Critical Look at Pro Publica."

The Knight Foundation supports a number of media projects, one of which is the Internews Network. This is a significant show of support as the Internews Network is a large media agency that has a long history of collaboration with the US government and the National Endowment for Democracy. Created in 1982, Internews, like CIMA, promotes a special brand of independent media; that is, media that is independent -- or free -- of any questioning of the hegemonic US media.(4) In 2005, the president of Internews, David Hoffman, co-wrote an article (with conservative commentator Helle Dale) in which he observed that his network played a crucial role in the "war of ideas," a war that he believes should rely upon the "two pillars of American democracy -- free enterprise and free media." According to many critical media scholars these "pillars" are more likely to undermine American democracy than strengthen it. For instance, with regard to US mainstream media consumers, Michael Parenti writes:

The sinister commandant who tortures Winston in [George] Orwell's 1984 lets us know he is an oppressor. The vision of the future is of a boot pressing down on a human face, he tells his victim. The ideological control exercised in the United States today is far more insidious. Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade. "For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent.... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions," writes Herbert Schiller. (5)

Returning to Internews, strong criticisms of their ambitions to promote US foreign policy interests in the global war of words have come from foreign governments all over the world. It is correctly argued that Internews, along with other foreign NGOs, are operating illegally by manipulating their political systems in the same way that the U.S. would cry foul if China or Venezuela were bankrolling independent media outlets in the U.S. Following on from this point, some leaders have fittingly restricted the ability of foreign-financed NGOs to operate within their countries, as such selectively backed NGOs are considered to play an important role in what have been referred to as post-modern coups, for example Eastern Europe's "colour revolutions." Thus resistance from foreign governments towards US media interventions formed a major rationale for CIMA to publish the "Soft Censorship" report.

Bringing us back to the present, just last week CIMA organized a workshop titled "Green Journalism: Environmental Reporting in Developing Countries" with featured speakers including Sanjeev Chatterjee, the executive director of the Knight Foundation-supported Knight Center for International Media, Rob Taylor, the director of Science and Environment Programs at the NED-funded International Center for Journalists, and Jon Sawyer, the executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. (6) Needless to say, the environment is not a new area of concern for democracy manipulators like the NED or CIMA, and the NED has been channelling funds to environmental causes and journalists for years. Instead, it is more likely that CIMA's leading concern at this meeting was not the protection of the environment, but rather ensuring that the environmental writers who influence the public are able to suitably balance the "need" for economic growth with environmental sustainability. That is, CIMA sees an urgent need for environmental journalists -- especially those based in countries that are being exploited by Western corporations -- to report in an "objective," professional manner that highlights individual cases of corruption and exploitation and thus avoid public exposure of the systemic governmental, economic, structural, and institutional reasons enabling the degradation of the world's environment. Last week's meeting was undertaken as a means of reviewing and renewing commitment to the manipulation of environmental media networks. (7)

This article, in examining CIMA's recent work, has touched, in broad terms, on the magnitude of the US government's aim to manipulate the media. Regrettably -- other than exposing the subtle processes of philanthropic global media colonisation -- there is little that can be done to seriously reduce such influence. Thus the onus is on progressive citizens concerned with elite media manipulation to create and support vibrant media alternatives devoid of elite funding, which with persistence will allow us to build local and global movements that can ultimately render all attempts of elite manipulation futile.

Notes
1. "Chile has a long history of political inference relayed through 'independent' media. During the 1960s the newspaper El Mercurio received a helping hand from covert CIA funding to assist in the destabilization of the democratically elected Allende government, whose leadership was abruptly terminated when President Allende was assassinated in 1973 by a CIA-led coup. With Allende's government deposed, the following Pinochet dictatorship heavily censored the media, an action ignored by the U.S. However, in the late 1980s when the U.S. decided that it was time to replace Pinochet, the NED was used to provide aid to politically favoured groups -- like the Christian Democrats -- who in 1987, were able to break through the communicative barriers erected by Pinochet with their newly established newspaper, La Epoca, 'which quickly became one of the country's main dailies'. Later on in 1990, to support a US bid to oust the incumbent party, the NED provided Demokratzia (the newspaper of the opposition party -- Union of Democratic Forces) with 'US$233,000 worth of newsprint, to allow it to increase its size and circulation for the period leading up to the national elections'." See Michael Barker, Civil Society, Empowered or Overpowered: The Role of The Mass Media in 'Promoting Democracy' Worldwide (PDF), Referred paper presented to the Australian & New Zealand Communication Association International Conference, University of Adelaide, July 4-7, 2006.
For information about the NED's role in the Ukraine, see Michael Barker, Mediating Protests: A Critical Examination of the Relation Between the Mass Media and Social Movements (PDF), Referred paper presented to the Convergence, Citizen Journalism & Social Change: Building Capacity conference, University of Queensland, March 25-27, 2008. (back)
2. David Edward, "Interview with Alan Rusbridger (Editor, The Guardian)," Media Lens, December 2000; James Petras, "Mass Media and Mass Politics: Conservative, Liberal and Marxist Perspectives," The James Petras Website, May 11, 2008; UKWatch, "John Theobald and the Media: An Interview with David Berry," Fifth-Estate-Online, April 2007. For an assortment of online documentaries that critique the US mainstream media, see here (collated courtesy of the Teach Peace Foundation). (back)
3. A couple of examples from the introductory pages of the report include two Argentinean groups, the Association for Civil Rights and Citizen Power Foundation, and the Columbia-based Foundation for New Iberian-American Journalism. For further criticisms of the work of these groups see my articles, "Washington Promotes 'Independent' Media in Venezuela," and "Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Democracy Manipulators." (back)
4. The "Soft Censorship" report cites Ann Olson, "deputy chief of party and senior advisor for Internews Network in Ukraine," as an authority on independent media. Olson is a former Knight Foundation international journalism fellow who herself recently served as a CIMA consultant, writing a report for them last year. This makes it very clear what CIMA means by really be independent. (back)
5. Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (St. Martin's Press, 1986), p.24. (back)
6. Headed by Jon Sawyer, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting describes its mission as "supporting the independent international journalism that U.S. media organizations are increasingly less willing to undertake." The Center "functions as an independent division of the World Security Institute," a non-profit group that ostensibly supports "independent research and journalism on global affairs." Bruce Blair founded the World Security Institute in 2000 (and still heads the organization), and prior to launching this group he served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution for thirteen years. In addition to being the president of the World Security Institute, Blair also helps head up an independent division of the institute called Center for Defense Information, and is the executive producer for yet another division called Azimuth Media -- which produces the (liberal foundation supported) PBS show, Foreign Exchange, a show that was formerly hosted by "Spokesperson for the Global Elite," Fareed Zakaria. (Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, a board member of the elite planning group the Trilateral Commission, and he formerly acted as the managing editor of the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs from 1992 until 2000.)
Returning to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, two particularly interesting members of the Center's six-person-strong advisory council are Charlayne Hunter-Gault (who is a former National Correspondent for PBS, and in 1992 served as a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations) and Geneva Overholser (who formerly served on the editorial board of The New York Times, is a board member of the CIMA-linked Center for Public Integrity, and sits on the Knight Foundation's journalism advisory committee).
Finally, if the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is not just an elite front group and is truly interested in reporting on stories that are rarely covered in the US media then they might want to investigate the acquaintances of one of their three trustees, William Bush. This is because Bush is currently the partner-in-charge of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP ("one of the largest law firms in the United States"), a firm whose current executive committee chair, Steven Pfeiffer, was a former board member of the CIA-linked Riggs National Corporation (whose board members included the brother of George H.W. Bush, Jonathan J. Bush). A critical investigation of Pfeiffer's background might for instance examine his role as a board member of the Africa-America Institute (which formerly received NED-funding in the early 1990s), because fellow board members with equally unsavoury backgrounds (to just mention two) include the president of the world's largest diamond supplier De Beers Inc. USA (Rosalind Kainyah), and Maurice Tempelsman, who similarly "has a long and bloody history in Africa." In addition, Pfeiffer is linked to a long-running "humanitarian" project known as Project HOPE, which according to their Web site, "first pioneered medical diplomacy by developing friendly relationships with peoples of different cultures and orientations, through sharing of medical knowledge and treating patients alongside health professional counterparts." Indeed, the current chair of Project HOPE, Charles Sanders, is a trustee of the neoliberal Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is a board member of Genentech (one of the world's most successful biotechnology corporations); while another notable board member is J. Michael McQuade (who is a senior vice president for Science and Technology for the major defence contractor, United Technologies). Project HOPE appears to play a key "humanitarian" function for corporate elites in Africa, and it even works with another controversial group known as Engender Health that undertakes "health" work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- a country that should certainly be the focus of critical "crisis reporting" by the Pulitzer Center. (back)
7. For instance, as reported in an earlier article, in Russia the NED has provided support to the Environmental Rights Center's Environment and Rights Journal (which has been published since February 2002), and whose editor-in-chief, Grigory Pasko, was awarded the Fondation de France Prize in 2002 from the NED-connected Reporters Without Borders. (back)

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About the Author
Michael Barker has recently handed in his PhD thesis at Griffith University in Australia. His other articles can be accessed at michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com.

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