A Glenn Beck Counter-Counter Boycott?
By The Pajama Pundit | Related entries in Partisan Nonsense
My head is starting to spin. Luckily for me, Conor Clarke can make some sense of it all:
What’s the logical conclusion here? Do we boycott and counter-boycott, until we’ve whittled ourselves down to country of red and blue companies as well as red and blue states? There’s nothing to stop us. Fox is well within its rights to retain the hosting services of Glenn Beck, and Wal-Mart is within its rights to take its advertising dollars elsewhere, and the readership of RedState.org is within its rights to take its paychecks elsewhere, too. And I suppose I can take my eyeballs to some other corner of the Internet. Three cheers for liberalism!And yet I cannot help but think there is a crucial difference between GEICO’s decision to drop Glenn Beck and RedState’s decision to drop GEICO. The difference is this: Wal-Mart has a good reason to boycott Beck, because Beck actually did something idiotic and indefensible. It simply is not true that Obama is a racist. And what’s this business about “the white culture,” anyway? Tell us a bit more about that, Glenn.
RedState does not have a similarly reasonable claim — or a substantive argument at all — unless they are seriously interested in defending what Beck said on the merits. (Are they? Is anyone? Let’s have that argument, pretty please.) The argument for boycotting the boycotters should be more than “free speech is awesome,” since the right to free speech doesn’t guarantee you the right to massive corporate underwriting.
Links added.
What I know is this: Beck cannot stand on his original statement. This is not a conspiracy of leftists, this is a result of people who are fed up with the inflammatory rhetoric (‘flamoric’?) and partisan hackery from someone who is simply trying to be shocking for shock’s (and rating’s) sake. Advertisers are going to continue to bail until Glenn Beck a) apologizes or b) loses his show (my guess is that it will be the former rather than the latter).
Either way, it’s going to likely be an entertaining ride. Now where did I put my popcorn?
[cross-posted at ThePajamaPundit.com]
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 and is filed under Partisan Nonsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 19th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
A simple case of the market reacting.
August 19th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
This isn’t gonna help Beck at all.
If you advertise on his show you get yelled at by the left. If you stop you get yelled at by the right. Solution: don’t start advertising on his show.
August 19th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
And if you call into his show and try to say something intelligent, Glenn Beck yells at you….
I have so little regard for Glenn Beck the notion of yelling at him is like yelling at a table. Of all the rightwing talking heads, I cannot figure out for the life of me why he has had any success.
Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and even Hannity are calculating SOBs who tailor there message to make a buck–Beck and Levin just spout nonsense without a thought behind it. They are truly, completely clueless
August 20th, 2009 at 9:07 am
gerryf Says:
And that’s different from every other political or sports talk show on AM radio… how?
Agnostick
[email protected]
August 20th, 2009 at 11:16 am
It never happens on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
August 20th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
NPR is FM. :-)
August 22nd, 2009 at 12:53 am
Beck has not taken losing sponsors lightly as supposedly he has been spending much of his off camera time alone crying in dark, musty stairwells. Check out his new ridiculous sponsors… http://unreasonablysafe.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/becksnewsponsors/
August 22nd, 2009 at 10:47 am
HAHA! Great link! My dad actually bartended at Dick’s Halfway Inn. It’s down near Laurie, Missouri at the Lake of the Ozarks. We had a lake house down there for years.
Wow. Small world.
August 22nd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
The wikipedia page is nearly as entertaining:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck
I particularly like the wikipedia controversy page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Glenn_Beck
August 31st, 2009 at 11:20 am
That’s okay – his new ratings are off the chart. Those advertisers will come crawling back! HAHA! Even if they don’t there are so many supporters – we can make up the difference in lost revenue! It’s worth it to watch liberals swallow their own medicine!
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:27 am
You say it’s crazy to believe Obama is a racist: Someone please explain to me why he sat in the pews of Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years, was married by the good Rev, and dedicated a book to him, and on and on and on? (I guess most the left doesn’t even believe Wright is a racist and that the OJ Simpson jurors were impartial)
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:19 am
This statement opposing Glenn Beck’s statements in the name of “people who are fed up with the inflammatory rhetoric” consititutes nothing more than and ad populum attack on free speech. No one seems to be saying that this Web site cannot attack Glenn Beck’s character. You all seem to be availing yourselves of the presumed right to freely to say what you please. That’s what we used to call 1st Amendment rights (see below).
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
That will hold true until this new Sotomayor Supreme Court decides that the 1st Amendment does not apply to the states, which if you look at the text of the Amendment (above) — strictly speaking, it doesn’t.
This is where the Republic falls to communism and to the abuses of those who got their fair share from America but don’t want anyone else to.