CNN president Jon Klein is out--replaced by Ken Jautz, who was the boss 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 Ken Jautz's description of Beck: "Glenn's style is self-deprecating, cordial; he says he'd like to be able to disagree with guests and part as friends. It's conversational, not confrontational."

As Klein leaves, I can't help but remember that back in 2005 he explained to Charlie Rose that there couldn't be a left-liberal answer to Fox News because those people "don't get too worked up about anything." As FAIR noted back then:

When Rose asked if there could ever be a successful progressive version of Fox News Channel, Klein thought not. He explained that while Fox was tapping into a brand of "mostly angry white men" conservatism,

a quote/unquote, "progressive" or liberal network probably couldn't reach the same sort of an audience, because liberals tend to like to sample a lot of opinions. They pride themselves on that. And you know, they don't get too worked up about anything. And they're pretty morally relativistic. And so, you know, they allow for a lot of that stuff.

Now you can argue that MSNBC doesn't really do the same thing as Fox. (Who could, really?) But it's pretty clear that someone in management over there decided--once it was safe to do so--that you could play to the left.  And you know what happened? Most of the time, they wind up getting more prime-time viewers than CNN.

Web-based outlets like Salon (7/21/10) and Talking Points Memo (7/21/10) have picked up on the connection--apparently first pointed out by dagblog (7/21/10)-- between shooting suspect Byron Williams and Fox News host Glenn Beck. But to judge from a Nexis search, traditional media have ignored the story almost completely. (One exception, found via Facebook:  local CBS station KPIX, 7/21/10.)

Arrested in Oakland after he was wounded in a shootout, Williams is said by police to have had both a hefty arsenal and plans to commit mass murder at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation.  The latter organization, a group that supports environmental and social justice causes (including, in the past, FAIR), is not exactly a household name--so what would make a Tim McVeigh wannabe fixate on it?

Williams' mother said he followed TV news and was upset at "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items." (SF Chronicle, 7/19/10). We don't know what specifically he watched, but his reported obsessions parallel those of Glenn Beck, who gives Tides a prominent position in those conspiracy flowcharts that he routinely presents to his audience as a threat to all that is good.

On his August 12, 2009, radio show, Beck portrayed the group as the force behind archnemesis Van Jones:

The Tides Foundation, they started laying the groundwork on this back during the Reagan administration. They have been assembling an army that we have laughed at and have dismissed as a bunch of community organizers.

Tides became a regular part of Beck's cast of sinister characters. On one radio broadcast (9/29/09), he described the foundation as being  "behind it all...involved in the nasty of the nastiest."

Perhaps Beck's most recent attack on Tides came earlier this month, on his July 13 Fox show. Here's TPM's description:

And most recently, on July 13, Beck was railing against the former New Black Panther Party Chairman Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad, who he showed in a clip saying: "Why kill the babies? They're just little innocent blue-eyed babies. (Expletive), they're going to grow up one day to rule your babies. Kill them now."

Beck then tied this to Tides, saying that liberal groups "are using failing capitalism to destroy it. They're using the churches through social justice. The media -- do I have to explain that one? This is what progressives and all power-seekers do. They find something vulnerable. They latch on to it. They exploit it for power."

He added that Tides "infiltrated" the education system, the media, and capitalism during the Reagan administration, but indicated that now that they're in power, liberal groups will not be able to disavow people like Muhammad: "When they are the ones holding the guns, sometimes it is hard to stop those who said, 'Yes, we can kill white babies.'"

It's hard to say whether or not Beck believes that the Tides Foundation is the linchpin of a sinister plot that's going to lead, if left unchecked, to the extermination of white children. Thanks to his work, though, it's a good bet that a lot of his most fervent fans believe precisely that.

Glenn Beck says progressives are trying to "fundamentally transform the country" by rendering the Constitution "irrelevant" ("In 1920, they stopped studying the Constitution in law school and started studying case law!"), and by expunging from history the role "religion and morals" played in our founding.

On his April 28 show, Beck announced the launch of Founders Fridays segment, a special feature by which Beck intends to counter these progressive lies with...the truth:

Every Friday is going to be Founders' Fridays on the program, at least for the next month. And if nobody watches, well, then, we'll keep doing it anyway. We are going to try to repair some of the damage that is being done by truth. Truth. Truth is like fire. It will burn. It will burn everything that is impure. It will set on fire all lies. But it will not consume the truth. So we'll set a few fires by spewing the truth.

Don't think that Beck will have to do all this truth-spewing and fire-setting by himself; he'll have help from guests who "have history":

We're going to have some people in here who have history, who know the Founders better than anybody else on Earth. One of the guys who's going to be joining us for some of these is David Barton, author of Original Intent and founder of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes.

In "The Right's Library of Fake Quotes," Extra! (4/10) documents many instances where conservatives have promoted fabricated historical quotes, religious and otherwise:

One of the most prolific purveyors of bogus founder quotes is Christian theocrat David Barton. Though not a household name, Barton's tireless efforts to construct a Christian origin story for the United States have been praised by the likes of Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich (Church & State, 7-8/96). His 1989 book The Myth of Separation attributed bogus quotes to Washington (''It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible''), Jefferson ("I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens") and Patrick Henry ("It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ"). Barton has also misattributed the "Ten Commandments" quote to Madison.

In 1996 Barton admitted that these and nine other quotes he'd been circulating in his writings, videotapes and live appearances were either false or unverifiable (Church & State, 7-8/96). But Barton's reputation suffered little from the fraud, according to Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church & State. "He's doing better than ever," Boston told Extra!, noting that since 1996 Barton has served as vice-chair of the Texas GOP, and now sits on the Texas state committee advising the state's board of education on history and social studies curriculum, "despite no history credentials."

But Barton is no stranger to the show, having appeared several times with Beck in the recent past (e.g. 4/30/10, 4/8/10, 3/15/10.) And Barton has apparently had a real impact on Beck, who repeated one of the spurious George Washington quotes he is famous for promoting on his March 5 show: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

Beck and Barton should thank God that truth doesn't really burn lies.

Fox host Glenn Beck has had it (4/27/10) with opponents of Arizona's new immigration law making analogies to Nazi Germany:

I hate to rain on the hate parade here, but can we please slow down for just a minute and, I don't know, think? You are comparing the systematic, cold-blooded extermination of  millions of Jews to America making sure people are here legally. The parallels are... nonexistent.

Indeed. The guy who's made a regular habit of deriding various White House officials as Communists, Maoists and the like is urging restraint with the historical analogies. Save the Hitler talk for people who really are behaving like the Nazis. Like Al Gore's climate change activism, for example:

Here's Beck talking about Al Gore on his radio show in 2006 (Media Matters, 6/8/06):

When you take a little bit of truth and then you mix it with untruth, or your theory, that’s where you get people to believe. . . . It’s like Hitler. Hitler said a little bit of truth, and then he mixed in “and it’s the Jews’ fault.” That’s where things get a little troublesome, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

UPDATE: Here's Glenn Beck on the cover of the current issue of Extra!, comparing the systematic, cold-blooded extermination of millions of Jews to...religions calling for social justice:

Fox News host Glenn Beck (4/13/10) came out against Social Security yesterday:

Have you ever wondered why we even have Social Security? It's not an American idea. It's first from Germany in the late 1800s. Hmmm, lets see, who else was prominent in Germany at that time...Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche. This is where the first progressive ideas came from, and when those ideas floated across the Atlantic, they took America off course.... The progressive wave of European social insurance infected America and this is the result of it. This is European thinking, not American.

Now, factchecking Glenn Beck is a bit like telling Jackson Pollack to color within the lines, but it's worth pointing out, as Matthew Yglesias (4/8/10) noted, that Nietzsche was not only not a progressive, he actually comes across as someone who today might be a Glenn Beck fan:

Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community.

But more interesting than Beck's forays into 19th century German philosophy are his attempts to whip up some resentment among his audience toward high-living grandmothers:

When FDR signed that Social Security bill, it wasn't designed to subsidize a cushy retirement, so seniors could jet set all across the globe on vacations. Social Security was meant as insurance....  In1930 life expectancy was only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65! You weren't even expected to ever get the benefits. Today life expectancy is 75 years for men, 80 years for women, and too many people rely and count on Social Security funding their weekly shuffleboard tournaments. You should have saved!

The odd thing about this is that Beck's audience, as with cable news in general, is pretty old--in a typical recent week, roughly 72 percent of his audience was 54 or older (assuming he doesn't have a lot of under-18 fans).  You have to wonder--how do they feel being painted as a bunch of freeloaders, currently or in the near future?

Beck may be falling into the trap of assuming that his followers have the same ideology that he does. He may oppose government social programs in general because he thinks such programs aren't "American"--but there's a large number of white Americans who oppose welfare programs because they are perceived as mainly benefiting black people, at the same time that they support social insurance programs like Social Security because they are seen as helping white people. One suspects that such people make up a significant percentage of Beck's biggest fans.

Appearing on the O'Reilly Factor (3/25/10) to discuss being named by Joy Behar as one of the media figures the View panelist (3/22/10) says are inspiring hate among Tea Party activists ("There is a difference between free speech and hate speech, and we've been listening to it from Beck and Limbaugh now. And these people are all juiced up by these two. That's what's happening"), Glenn Beck attempted to demonstrate his tolerance for his political foes in the following exchange:

BECK: Have you or I ever said Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to make a movie?

O'REILLY: No.

BECK: Michael Moore shouldn't be allowed to speak? Michael Moore shouldn't have his own TV show? Never.

O'REILLY: Never. Never.

BECK: Never. Because we believe in freedom of speech. George Washington called it the battlefield of ideas.

O'REILLY: Right.

While it may be true to say that Beck has never expressed a wish to see Michael Moore censored, precisely, he has expressed a desire to kill Moore with his bare hands:

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out--is this wrong?

Reasonable people might see this as a desire for an extreme form of censorship--and hateful to boot.

UPDATE: O'Reilly too has fantasized about assaulting Moore--in a non-censorious way, of course.  See FAIR Blog, 10/6/09.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz turns in a profile of Glenn Beck today (3/15/10) that includes a few interesting anecdotes. He reports that "Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists" from his own radio company, and that "a vice president was assigned 'to help keep an eye on that program' and review its content in advance--a full-time job."

Kurtz also notes that some Fox reporters aren't crazy about what his new fame is doing to them:

Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Yes, Beck is somehow undermining Fox's credibility in a way that that Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and Brit Hume hadn't managed to do yet.

Fox has always been conservative-- it was founded on an explicitly political agenda, after all--albeit one that Fox anchors and personalities would occasionally try to argue was merely a myth cooked up by the liberal media.

So what these Fox reporters are really saying is that Beck's presence on Fox makes it more difficult to fool people.

I don't know why it should surprise me that Glenn Beck doesn't know what he's talking about, but you'd think that if you had a furious grudge against someone who died 40 years before you were born, you would spend at least a little time finding out what exactly was wrong with that historical figure. But then, as Tom Frank explains in a subscribers-only column in the Wall Street Journal (3/10/10), you're not Glenn Beck:

Consider how Mr. Beck, the popular host of a Fox News program, began his performance at CPAC: "Hello. Please. Thank you. Please be seated. I have to tell you, I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me. God bless you."

Now, deploring the works of the 28th president is not a new thing at CPAC. But Mr. Beck has developed a theory of progressivism that he illustrated by listing the many tyrannical misdeeds of the Wilson administration: "he gives us the Fed." "He gives us the income tax." And then, a confusing few sentences later, "Prohibition. So he took away the alcohol. Progressive plan to take care of everyone."  It's easy to see how all of these villainies might come together in the mind of a freedom-fighting CPAC attendee: Progressives were the original big-government sinners; prohibition, which was backed by some progressives, was the classic example of misguided governmental overreach; Wilson, who was a progressive, was president when prohibition passed; ergo, prohibition must be added to the list of offenses that will keep Wilson in freedom purgatory for eons.

But the neat pattern does not hold. As it happens, Woodrow Wilson was not a prohibitionist. He even vetoed the 1919 Volstead Act, which enforced the 18th Amendment's prohibition of intoxicating liquors. (Congress overrode his veto.) By contrast, the laissez-faire hero Calvin Coolidge, whom Mr. Beck praised at CPAC, signed the 1929 Jones Act, which beefed up prohibition enforcement. Meanwhile, arch-progressive Franklin Roosevelt got prohibition repealed in 1933.

Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show's January 2009 debut. It's instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck's sense of whom and what his audience should be informed about:

ACORN: 1,224

Van Jones: 267

SEIU: 259

Afghanistan: 97

Iraq: 95

Valerie Jarrett: 52

Mark Lloyd: 50

Al-Qaeda: 50

Bill Ayers: 46

John Holdren: 43

Jeremiah Wright: 42

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 41

Osama Bin Laden: 40

Taliban: 38

Michael Moore says he won't appear on Glenn Beck's or Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show to promote his new film Capitalism: A Love Story because there's too much hate speech on those shows. Last night, O'Reilly strengthened Moore's argument in a segment in which he discussed Michael Moore's body language with regular guest Tonya Reimer:

O'REILLY: Right. Would it be wrong if I slapped him?

REIMAN: We'll have to let him judge that.

O'REILLY: You just want....

REIMAN: Not a big fan, are we?

O'REILLY: You know, it's an interesting question. I admire his entrepreneurship. I admire his creativity. But there's just something about him, you know.

Add to this that Glenn Beck once fantasized about killing Moore with his bare hands (not to mention seeing Dennis Kucinich burned alive), and you have a network whose two leading hosts have expressed a desire to physically attack Moore for expressing beliefs with which they disapprove.

Naturally, O'Reilly whined during the same segment that Moore refused to appear on his show:  "I might remind everybody Michael Moore would not come on the program. Even though he's got a dopey belief to publicize, he's too afraid." Maybe with good reason.

On his Media Citizen blog, Free Press' Timothy Karr (9/17/09) has compiled some astounding Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs quotes propounding a "fear that's laced with paranoia, stoked by misinformation and prejudice and fed to millions of people via powerful media"--namely that "the most anti-American notion of the lot is the idea that we need to reform the media itself":

While Beck and his ilk want to portray diversity and localism as a dangerous conspiracy to censor, the fact remains that these ideas have been staples of communications policy since the beginning. The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission--as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934--is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that "safeguarding the public's right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is ... an integral component of the FCC's mission."

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard.

"What mainstream media's fear-merchants are most afraid of," writes Karr, "is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job--creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media."

See the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "The Great Spectrum Giveaway" (10/95) by Jim Naureckas.

Mark Howard of News Corpse (9/3/09) has a look at a September 2 Fox News "sermon" in which Glenn Beck "has used his divine vision to reveal the evidence of Satan's secret seeds" in the form of "paintings and sculptures and other works by history’s subversives--the artists!"

As Beck "associates the evil artists with their patron, Rockefeller," Howard notes that, "unfortunately, he doesn't specify which one. In fact, he jumps around to several of them without making any distinction":

Beck begins his unveiling with a denouncement of a relief at the entrance to Rockefeller Center. The work shows two men on either side of the doors. Beck tells us that one is holding a hammer, and the other a sickle. Ergo communism! It's right there in plain sight. Except that the first man is actually holding a shovel, according to the historians curating the Center's artwork. The figures were meant to represent the strength of America's industry and agriculture, which I'm sure Beck views as treasonous.

Then Beck focuses on a bas relief carving by Italian-American sculptor Attilio Piccirilli called Youth Leading Industry. Beck's interpretation of this work centers on his theory that the artist, and thus the work, were avowedly fascist. Beck asserts that a strong male figure in the piece is Mussolini. Whether or not that's true, and there is some debate, it is illustrative of Beck's dementia that he can jump from warnings about progressives being communists to progressives being fascists without taking a breath.

"In the real world," meanwhile, Howard explains the historical fact that "Mussolini was a bitter foe of Stalin and vice versa." See the recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Eva Paterson (Huffington Post, 8/28/09),  president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, has a response to Glenn Beck's assertion that "I want to point out the silence; no one has challenged these facts" after having been "smearing White House special advisor Van Jones for days on his show."

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

Media Matters research director Jeremy Schulman (8/12/09) writes that "Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have used their radio and television shows to incite hatred and push wild conspiracy theories, leading several of Beck's advertisers to reportedly pull out of his broadcasts"--one of the hazards inherent in for-profit media.

But "many advertisers have nonetheless sponsored these hosts' hate speech in recent weeks, including major corporations and organizations that, in 2006, reportedly requested that ABC Radio Networks not air their advertisements during any Air America programs":

At the time,

ABC subsequently provided a statement to Media Matters, which read: "It is not uncommon for advertisers and/or agencies to request that their ads run or not run in specific programming environments or dayparts. ABC Radio Networks does not solicit nor encourage these requests from advertisers. If a request is made by an advertiser and /or agency we make our best effort to comply."...

The New York Times reported at the time that "the advertisers' avoidance of Air America's liberal programming seems pointed when contrasted with the commercial success of right-wing talk radio programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity." [New York Times, 11/6/06]

Indeed, Schulman tells us how, "despite their appearance on ABC's Air America 'blackout' list in 2006, a number of those same advertisers have recently run ads during broadcasts of one or more of the following: Limbaugh's radio show, Beck's Fox News show, Beck's radio show, Dobbs' CNN show and Dobbs' radio show." He then provides for your perusal a handy list of said advertisers, including--no surprise--General Electric.

The Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition, along with the National Hispanic Media Coalition (8/11/09), "applauds" the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for being "the first elected body to take a stand against hate speech in media" by having

approved unanimously a resolution urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to conduct a comprehensive investigation on hate speech in media, allowing public participation via public hearings, and for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to update its 1993 report the "Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes."

The Supervisors responded to grassroots activists in the Bay Area who have organized to call attention to the alarming increase of patently false and hateful language in media. For the last three years, the Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition SF has organized annual protests held at Clear Channel Communications.

Clear Channel is specifically "selected as the protest site due to the corporation's record of promoting some of the most virulent purveyors of hate and intolerance, including Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, who denigrate communities, groups and individuals."

Read the resolution on the City of San Francisco's website.

Also check out the profiles of Savage, Beck and other media hatemongers on FAIR's Smearcasting.com site--and see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Hate Speech, Media Activism and the First Amendment: Putting a Spotlight on Dehumanizing Language" (5/09) by Candice O'Grady.