FAIR Blog » Van Jones http://www.fair.org/blog The national media watch group Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:42:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Fox Coverage of OWS: Now Even Beckier! http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/10/17/fox-coverage-of-ows-now-even-beckier/ http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/10/17/fox-coverage-of-ows-now-even-beckier/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:15:41 +0000 Peter Hart http://www.fair.org/blog/?p=19523 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 Foundation. The Tides Foundation, his Open Society and Code Pink are involved in what is called the Wall Street Journal... Occupied Wall Street Journal. And it is a--it's a full color newspaper.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: You know what it costs to print a newspaper.

O'REILLY: Somebody is behind that.

BECK: Huge money. Huge money.

O'REILLY: Right, and what's the editorial bent of the newspaper?

BECK: Revolution.

O'REILLY: OK, overthrow?

BECK: Yes, I mean, you know, collapse the system.

Beck manages to names names. SEIU and the Working Families Party are involved in what is obviously a global Marxist revolution. (Some of the evidence has been erased from Craigslist, but Beck has it.)

And, Beck warns, it goes all the way to the White House. Barack Obama is a "street organizer.... He knows everything that's going on, he knows all the people that are involved." Beck went on to predict that there will be violence, and that Van Jones will emerge to reap the benefits.

To be fair, O'Reilly offered another take, one more sympathetic to the protests. That came courtesy of Geraldo Rivera.

]]> http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/10/17/fox-coverage-of-ows-now-even-beckier/feed/ 13 Know Your Enemy http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/10/19/know-your-enemy/ http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/10/19/know-your-enemy/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:41:32 +0000 Jim Naureckas http://www.fair.org/blog/?p=13136 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

]]> http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/10/19/know-your-enemy/feed/ 2 The Fabulously Unsurprising Lies of Glenn Beck http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/08/31/the-fabulously-unsurprising-lies-of-glenn-beck/ http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/08/31/the-fabulously-unsurprising-lies-of-glenn-beck/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:37:05 +0000 Gabriel Voiles http://www.fair.org/blog/?p=12521 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.

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