Who Will Pay For Glenn Beck's Racism And Hatred On Fox Now?

The Color Of Change campaign asking advertisers to stop underwriting Glenn Beck's outrageous incitement of racism, civil discord and violent rage has been very successful. Mainstream advertisers are telling Fox they want their ads pulled from Beck's shows. Normally an advertiser just buys a run of ads and they are placed across all programming. I know; I work with the Blue America ad buyer, Jacquie Propps, and we just placed our second flight of cable TV ads in Arkansas explaining the unhelpful role Blanche Lincoln has taken in the health care debate. When I went over the list of where the first 1,000 spot ran, I noticed that right in there with spots on The Fugitive, Anderson Cooper 360, Reba and Larry King Live, shows that all reach the kind of mainstream audience we were looking for, were several ads in Little Rick, Pine Bluff and Fayetteville on Beck's show. We were aghast and asked the cable operators to pull the ads that started running yesterday from that show, which they were able to do before any had run. Whew! Color of Change didn't have to ask us; we were self policing. And many of the Beck advertisers were in the same place we were. They didn't even know their spots were underwriting TV's biggest hate monger.

Color of Change has so far persuaded GEICO, Proctor & Gamble, Lawyers.com, Progressive Insurance, SC Johnson, Ally Bank, Men's Wearhouse, Sargento, Travelocity, Radio Shack, ConAgra (maker of Healthy Choice products), Roche, Sanofi-Aventis. Here's part of a letter from Radio Shack to Color of Change:

This confirms that there is no advertising we (RadioShack) [are] buying on the Glen Beck Show or anywhere on the Fox News Channel. What viewers are seeing on FNC and Glen Beck is manufacturer advertising that has tagged their messages with "RadioShack" as the retail destination to purchase their product(s).  In this most recent instance, it is most likely the product called magicJack that has tagged our name throughout their commercial.

We've asked magicJack to immediately cease and desist running all commercials with our name tagged in the spot on FNC. In fact, I just received verification from one our merchants that magicJack has confirmed the commercial will be pulled from the Fox News Channel rotation ASAP.

With Beck weeping and whining that Color of Change's campaign is being orchestrated by powerful forces out to get him, the campaign got some added impetus today when conservative blogger-- and former Bush speech writer, David Frum published a piece on the violence the "reckless right" is fomenting. His point is that irresponsible and hysterical fanatics like Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity are using raw and dangerous extremism to court the kind of ratings that attract advertisers-- very weak-minded people who sit in front of their TVs all day-- people with no lives who are open to suggestion, whether about buying a product or working themselves up into racist, murderous passions.

A man bearing a sidearm appears outside President Obama’s Aug. 11 town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., under a sign proclaiming, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.”

That phrase of course references a famous statement of Thomas Jefferson’s, from a 1787 letter: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”

Earlier that same day, another man is arrested inside the school building in which the president will speak. Police found a loaded handgun in his parked car.

At an event held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona last week, police were called after one attendee dropped a gun.

Nobody has been hurt so far. We can all hope that nobody will be. But firearms and politics never mix well. They mix especially badly with a third ingredient: the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters.

The Nazi comparisons from Rush Limbaugh; broadcaster Mark Levin asserting that President Obama is “literally at war with the American people”; former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claiming that the president was planning “death panels” to extirpate the aged and disabled; the charges that the president is a fascist, a socialist, a Marxist, an illegitimate Kenyan fraud, that he “harbors a deep resentment of America,” that he feels a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” that his government is preparing concentration camps, that it is operating snitch lines, that it is planning to wipe away American liberties”: All this hysterical and provocative talk invites, incites, and prepares a prefabricated justification for violence.

And indeed some conservative broadcasters are lovingly anticipating just such an outcome.
Here’s Fox News’ Glenn Beck clucking sympathetically that white males are being driven into murderous rage by “political correctness.”

Here again is Beck chuckling as he play-acts the poisoning of Nancy Pelosi.

Just yesterday, the radio host Sean Hannity openly contemplated violence-- and primly tut-tutted that if it occurs, the president will have only himself to blame.

Hyperbolic accusation and fantasy murder may well serve a talk-radio industry facing a collapse in advertising revenues-- down 30–40 percent over the past two years, reports NewMajority.com’s Tim Mak.

As revenues dwindle, hosts feel compelled to intensify the talk-radio experience, hoping to win larger audience share with more extreme talk. It’s like the early days of the pornography industry: At first a naked woman is thrilling enough, but soon a jaded audience is demanding more and more, wilder and wilder.

For the radio hosts, it’s all mostly a cynical marketing exercise. But the audience? Not all of them know better.

In April, the Department of Homeland Security released a report warning of the danger of right-wing political violence in the United States, and mainstream conservatives erupted in offense.

...It’s not enough for conservatives to repudiate violence, as some are belatedly beginning to do. We have to tone down the militant and accusatory rhetoric. If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him.

But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt.

Color of Change has turned the tables on Beck and on Fox News. The ad revenues they were hoping to generate by ginning up racism and bigotry among paranoid seniors and angry low-information, anti-intellectual viewers is instead decreasing as more and more advertisers decline to have their products identified with Beck's divisive Goebbels-like ranting. Soon no one will be buying ad space on Beck's show but shady companies trying to hoodwink feebleminded elderly folks into buying gold.