Glenn Beck may be feeling slightly less than relaxed and rejuvenated after returning from vacation on Monday. Since he's been gone, the number of advertisers who've signed on to dissociate themselves from The Glenn Beck Show's rhetoric of fear-mongering paranoia has reached a total of 36--up from 20 just one week ago.
Advertisers including Wal-Mart, Geico, CVS, Clorox and Sprint have discontinued their commercials from airing on Beck's self-titled Fox News show--and it's not hard to see why. The fallout has stemmed largely from Glenn Beck's declaration that he believes President Barack Obama to be a racist--a comment which, sadly enough, makes up only a percentage of Beck's total on-air proliferation of inflammatory hateful rhetoric and fear-mongering.
On Tuesday during his 5 p.m. EDT show, instead of addressing the boycott spearheaded by Color of Change to protest the talk show host's remark about President Obama last month, Beck essentially acted like a child who's been caught behaving badly...but won't admit he did it. The difference is that Glenn Beck is old enough to know better. Instead of accepting responsibility for his actions and apologizing, Beck spent much of his show attacking Color of Change co-founder Van Jones. (Sidenote: Jones is the current special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He's widely respected for his efforts to retrofit and re-power America using clean, green energy -- while also creating millions of new green jobs).
"Glenn Beck is trying to change the subject," said Color of Change executive director James Rucker to the LA Times. "The issue is his baseless fear mongering." Glenn Beck is doing his best to usher in a new era of fear mongering and histrionics every weeknight on his show--and it's up to us to push back. So far, the campaign to call on advertisers to drop sponsorship of Glenn Beck has amassed more than 160,000 signatures. Join the call to hold Glenn Beck and Fox News accountable for Beck's race baiting.
In other Glenn Beck "news"... On the August 24 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program, Beck claimed there is "evil at play" in the Obama administration...and talked for several minutes about how he thinks "they" are out to destroy him.
Glenn Beck's always been a "colorful" character, but this is a little over the top, even for him. Guess Beck just can't fathom the reality that much of the American public (including us) might not find his narrow viewpoint and hateful, inflammatory rhetoric objectionable and counter-productive--so instead, he chooses to spurts crazy right-wing fodder that there is some conspiracy theory at play and people are out to get him.
Beck said on Aug. 24 that is going to detail it on his show tonight--and Sarah Palin is rallying her Facebook community to watch him tonight as well. As one of my coworkers joked this morning...."Someone should bring popcorn for this!"
Cross-posted from the SEIU Blog here.