Details of a revamped version of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 show the Senate bill could give the president a "kill switch" on the Internet and allow him to shut out private networks from online access. FOXNews.comFriday, August 28, 2009 A Senate bill would offer President Obama emergency control of the Internet and may give him a "kill switch" to shut down online traffic by seizing private networks -- a move cybersecurity experts worry will choke off industry and civil liberties.
Details of a revamped version of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 emerged late Thursday, months after an initial version authored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., was blasted in Silicon Valley as dangerous government intrusion.
"In the original bill they empowered the president to essentially turn off the Internet in the case of a 'cyber-emergency,' which they didn't define," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which represents the telecommunications industry.
"We think it's a very bad idea ... to put in legislation," he told FOXNews.com.
Clinton said the new version of the bill that surfaced this week is improved from its first draft, but troubling language that was removed was replaced by vague language that could still offer the same powers to the president in case of an emergency.
"The current language is so unclear that we can't be confident that the changes have actually been made," he said.
The new legislation allows the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and make a plan to respond to the danger, according to an excerpt published online -- a broad license that rights experts worry would give the president "amorphous powers" over private users.
"As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET News.
A Senate source familiar with the bill likened the new power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when he grounded all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, CNET News reported.
Spokesmen for Senator Rockefeller and the Commerce Committee did not return calls seeking comment before this article was published.
But Rockefeller, who introduced the bill in April with bipartisan support, said the legislation was critical to protecting everything from water and electricity to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records.
"I know the threats we face," Rockefeller said in a prepared statement when the legislation was introduced. "Our enemies are real. They are sophisticated, they are determined and they will not rest."
The bill would also let the government create a detailed set of standards for licensing "cybersecurity professionals" who would oversee a single standard for security measures.
But many in the technology sector believe it's a job the government is ill-equipped to handle, said Franck Journoud, a policy analyst with the Business Software Alliance.
"Simply put, who has the expertise?" he told FOXNews.com in April. "It's the industry, not the government. We have a responsibility to increase and improve security. That responsibility cannot be captured in a government standard."
Clinton, of the Internet Security Alliance, praised President Obama's May science policy review, which he said would take cybersecurity in the right direction by promoting incentives to get the private industry to improve its own security measures.
But he faulted the Senate bill, which he said would centralize regulations for an industry that is too varied to fall under the control of a single set of rules without endangering the economy and security.
"We think a lot of things need to be done to enhance cybersecurity," he told FOXNews.com, but this bill is "not something that we could support."
Bill to Give the President Emergency Control of the Internet
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html
Bill would give president emergency control of Internet
by Declan McCullagh
CNet News
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.
The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.
"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."
Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.
A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.
When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.
The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit , and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.
Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.
The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective."
Update at 3:14 p.m. PDT: I just talked to Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee, on the phone. She sent me e-mail with this statement:
The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president's authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster. This particular legislative language is based on longstanding statutory authorities for wartime use of communications networks. To be very clear, the Rockefeller-Snowe bill will not empower a "government shutdown or takeover of the Internet" and any suggestion otherwise is misleading and false. The purpose of this language is to clarify how the president directs the public-private response to a crisis, secure our economy and safeguard our financial networks, protect the American people, their privacy and civil liberties, and coordinate the government's response.
Forget the Fairness Doctrine by Mark Llloyd, Obama's FCC pick
In His Own Words.....
The Center for American Progress late last month published a widely read report titled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” That report demonstrated the failure of the supposed “free market” regulation of the U.S. radio industry to address the public-interest needs of listeners. Our analysis revealed that conservative talk radio dominates the airwaves of our country—to the detriment of informed public discourse and the First Amendment.
Only the most misinformed still believe that radio group owners such as Citadel Broadcasting Corp., which refuses to air popular progressive hosts like Ed Shultz, are only concerned about the bottom line. Few would agree that markets such as Philadelphia and Houston are well served with 100 percent conservative talk radio. But that doesn’t mean that the answer to this pervasive imbalance is the Fairness Doctrine.
In
our report, we call for ownership rules that we think will create greater local diversity of programming, news, and commentary. And we call for more localism by putting teeth into the licensing rules. But we do not call for a return to the Fairness Doctrine.
Despite what we thought was fairly stark evidence of conservative bias, despite clear proposals to address that bias, Rush Limbaugh and other distortionists insisted that we were calling for a “return” of the Fairness Doctrine. But as we wrote, “simply reinstating the Fairness Doctrine will do little to address the gap between conservative and progressive talk unless the underlying elements of the public trustee doctrine are enforced, in particular, the requirements of local accountability and the reasonable airing of important matters.”
The power of right-wing talk radio and their echo chambers in the conservative blogosphere and Fox News was amply demonstrated by their simple “black or white, for or against” reaction to our report. They refused to discuss the underlying market control exercised by radio corporations eager to promote the conservative agenda. But it worked. Even the radio hosts of supposedly liberal public radio stations asked the authors of the report over and over, “Why are you calling for a return of the Fairness Doctrine?”
On one station, I responded that our report focused on media consolidation and localism, not the Fairness Doctrine. This sparked the host to ask, “Well, why
aren’t you calling for a return of the Fairness Doctrine?”
Okay, so why aren’t we calling for a return of the Fairness Doctrine? As we state in the report, the Fairness Doctrine never by itself fostered coverage of important issues in a way that spoke to the diversity of interests in local communities across our country. In the late 1960’s, the supposed golden age of the Fairness Doctrine, the Kerner Commission reported the failure of mainstream media to report on minority communities. The same could be said at the time regarding the reporting of the views of women or poor people or young people protesting against the war in Vietnam.
Despite the distortions of the Nixon-era media haters, mainstream broadcast media in the late 1960s was middle-class, anti-communist, Protestant, male and white. If dittoheads like to think of this as a “liberal” bias, so be it, but the Fairness Doctrine didn’t do much to address it.
Here’s the history that matters. In the late 1960s the United Church of Christ successfully challenged the Federal Communications Commission over the lack of local input in FCC decisions. A moderate Republican judge, Warren Burger, whom Nixon later appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, sided with the church group. As a result of that ruling, a whole slew of rules were put in place to give local communities power in the licensing of broadcasters.
In their engagement in the licensing process many of those groups cited the responsibility of the broadcaster to “afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.” This responsibility, which many think of as the core of the Fairness Doctrine, was established in the 1920s. But with public engagement in the 1970s the Fairness Doctrine finally had some teeth.
All reports of its demise to the contrary, this core responsibility remains in the Communications Act today. Today, however, the act once again simply has no teeth.
How broadcast licensees meet their responsibility of fair discussion of important public issues has varied considerably over 80 years of federal regulation. But the image of eager federal bureaucrats peering over the shoulders of all of America’s radio talk show hosts with a stopwatch in hand is as absurd as it is impractical.
We trace the rise and influence of Rush and other conservative radio hosts to relaxed ownership rules and other pro-big business regulation that destroyed localism. The supposed “repeal” of the Fairness Doctrine did not create Rush Limbaugh, just as the supposedly onerous Fairness Doctrine did not destroy Joe Pyne in the 1960s or Father Charles Coughlin in the decades before Pyne.
To be fair, even some progressives are confused about the Fairness Doctrine. A recent
news story reported that the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC for short, has asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine—even as the same article reports on a speech to LULAC by ABC News correspondent John Quinones, who spoke of his work bringing to audiences a hard-earned perspective to the long-running immigration debate.
Quinones told the LULAC audience that he got his start because a San Antonio community organization threatened that if the stations didn't hire more Latinos, the group would go to the FCC and challenge their licenses. "Thank God for them," Quinones said. "I wouldn't be here."
Equal opportunity employment policies. Local engagement. License challenges. Nothing in there about the Fairness Doctrine.
The other part of our proposal that gets the dittoheads upset is our suggestion that the commercial radio station owners either play by the rules or pay. In other words, if they don’t want to be subject to local criticism of how they are meeting their license obligations, they should pay to support public broadcasters who will operate on behalf of the local community. Commercial broadcasters want to be trustees of public property but without responsibility.
Unlike newspapers and movies and blogs and cable channels, the federal government gives commercial broadcasters a free license to use public property—the airwaves. There are still more people who want these licenses than the government is able to satisfy. In exchange for this very valuable and scarce license, and federal protection against “pirate” (unlicensed) radio operators, broadcasters are supposed to operate in the public interest.
That’s the deal. The broadcasters like the free license and the free protection, but they just don’t want the public involved in telling them whether they are actually serving the public interest. For 80 years the public interest has been defined as, you guessed it, providing a reasonable opportunity for the diverse expression of issues of local importance.
For over 25 years Henry Geller, a distinguished telecommunications attorney, has argued that broadcasters ignore the local public interest, that the whole “public trustee” idea is broken, and that instead of trying to make broadcasters play by the rules we should just make them pay a reasonable fee to support public broadcasting. But spectrum license fees should not be put in the federal treasury as they are now. Instead, they should be used to advance the public’s First Amendment interest in diverse speech at the local and national levels. We think Geller makes a strong argument.
We at the Center are delighted at the increased attention our report has brought to the obligations of broadcasters to provide local communities they are licensed to serve with opportunities for diverse expression of important issues. The status quo does not serve our democracy well. We want to create more ownership opportunities and more speech focused on local interests. We want either clear rules that promote these First Amendment values or a reasonable payment to the public for the use of its property.
All of these public policy objectives are there for Congress and the FCC to act upon within current law. There is no need to return to the Fairness Doctrine.
Obama's Diversity Offensive Against Talk Radio
Sunday, August 30, 20094:05 PM
By: Christopher Ruddy
Conservative talk radio continues to flourish, but there are troubling signs that the Obama administration is seeking to silence the free and open exchange of views on the public airwaves.
Today 100 million people tune in to America's 2,000 talk-radio hosts each week, and the overwhelming majority of those hosts are conservative — a fact that has irked the left for years.
The recent controversy surrounding top-rated radio and TV talker Glenn Beck is emblematic of the Obama regime's efforts to stifle dissent in the media.
The African-American political organization Color of Change called for an advertiser boycott of Beck's programming after Beck said Obama "doesn't like white people" on July 28.
He was reacting to Obama's assertion that the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department had acted "stupidly" in its arrest of African-American professor Henry Louis Gates.
As it turns out, Color of Change was founded by Van Jones, who serves in the Obama White House as his "green-jobs czar," responsible for stimulating job growth in the environmental sector.
Obama has made no secret of his disdain for others in the conservative media. Shortly before the November election, he said in an interview, "I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls."
And in June he was clearly referring to Fox when he stated, "I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration."
Obama has also gone after Rush Limbaugh, telling GOP leaders shortly after his inauguration, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."
This is strange talk coming from a politician who promised he would "end politics as usual in Washington" and usher in a new era of bipartisanship in government.
Obama’s promise has been a sham. He and the Democrats rammed the $787 billion stimulus bill through Congress and remained intent on passing healthcare reform legislation without support from the GOP.
So it should come as no surprise that the Democrats are seemingly poised to launch a partisan attack on the conservative media.
"I guarantee you, many in Congress today do not like conservative talk radio — they haven't for years," talk-radio expert Brian Jennings, author of the new book "Censorship: The Threat to Silence Talk Radio," told Newsmax in a recent interview. "They feel that conservative talk radio is far too powerful."
The Senate in March passed legislation prohibiting the Federal Communications Commission from reinstating the so-called Fairness Doctrine.
The doctrine, repealed in 1987, mandated diversity by requiring broadcasters using the public airwaves to give equal time to opposing political views. Since talk radio is overwhelmingly dominated by conservative hosts, and liberal talk radio draws few listeners, the doctrine would likely force many radio stations to pull conservative hosts rather than air low-rated liberal hosts.
But Democrats have other tricks up their sleeves to attack conservative talk: The Senate passed an amendment calling on the FCC to "encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest."
Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, called the amendment an attempt to make an "end run" around the Senate action outlawing the Fairness Doctrine and create "a new means of censorship on the airways."
Most worrisome of Obama's moves in regard to the media is his recent appointment of Mark Lloyd as the FCC's first "chief diversity officer."
Two years ago Lloyd wrote an article calling on liberals to challenge conservative media moguls and station owners, particularly figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch.
He also wrote a book espousing the idea that private broadcasters (read: conservative broadcasters) should pay huge licensing fees to help fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a sharply left-leaning media outlet.
Lloyd made a stunning statement at a hearing by praising Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez, calling his regime "an incredible revolution, a democratic revolution" and noting that after a rebellion against his rule, Chavez "began to take very seriously the media in the country."
This same Hugo Chavez has been a harsh oppressor of opposition media in his country, and as recently as Aug. 2, he revoked the licenses of 34 radio stations.
"I find it interesting that someone who is so obviously biased can be appointed to such an important position inside the FCC," Brian Jennings said of Lloyd.
"He could make life miserable for conservative talk radio, and we can only surmise from his writings that's exactly what he wants to do."
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
War erupts over Glenn Beck TV show: Fans fight back
More advertisers join Boycott....see 2nd Story!
http://defendglenn.com/advertisers.php
The Back Story from WorldNetDaily
By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily Glenn Beck fans are fighting back against a campaign led by a black activist organization prompting major advertisers to withdraw from Beck's top-rated Fox News Channel program. Last week, NewsBusters reported President Obama's "green jobs czar," Van Jones, is co-founder of ColorofChange.org, an activist organization that has led a furious campaign against Beck culminating in major companies such as Geico and Lawyers.com pulling their spots from the Fox News star's daily show. In recent weeks, Beck has done several critical segments about Van Jones, who was appointed as the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Beck's segments were based in part on WND's reporting that Jones was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader. Now a husband and wife team of Beck fans has launched a website – DefendGlenn.com – that lists the contact information for advertisers for Beck's and other Fox News programs and provides users with information and suggestions to contact those companies to urge their continued sponsorship. The site also asks users to contact Beck's current patrons to thank them for their loyalty to the Fox News star's program. "Our goal is to hit advertisers hard with response from Beck fans with real purchasing power, unlike the instigators of this phony Astroturf boycott," the founder of DefendGlenn told WND. "At some point they will realize they've been punked by a bunch of paid activists, college students and slacker bloggers in their parents' basements who don't purchase their products anyway," said the founder, who asked that his name be withheld. ColorofChange, meanwhile, says it has garnered about 75,000 signatories for an online petition against Beck to be sent to advertisers. A Jones' group says the controversy stems from Beck's recent comment while a guest on another Fox News show that Obama is a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people." Bill Shine of Fox News' programming department clarified Beck was expressing "a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel. And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions." ColorofChange did not return a WND request for comment about whether its crusade is tied to Beck's recent reporting about Van Jones' radical connections. NewsBusters exposed Van Jones is a co-founder of ColorofChange. The group's executive director is James Rucker, who previously served as director of Grassroots Mobilization for the radical MoveOn.org. Immediately following the NewsBusters report, ColorofChange scrubbed its site of any mention of Jones. However, a Google cache of the site lists Jones as a founder. After NewsBusters pointed out the deletion, ColorofChange added Jones back to its site but now claims "Van hasn't been active in the work of ColorofChange in recent years." "After helping ColorofChange get started in 2005, Van moved on to other pursuits," the website now claims. Previously, the site simply listed Jones as a co-founder but did not claim any distance from the radical activist. Most major media reports on the ColorofChange campaign fail to note Jones is a founder of the group or that Beck has been reporting critically on Jones. Beck's program, meanwhile, has been taking major hits from the ColorofChange campaign. Geico and Lawyers.com have pulled their ads from the Fox News show, and Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance and SC Johnson have all claimed their ads were run in error and vowed to correct the mistake. Fox News said most of the companies will have their ads shifted to other Fox programs. According to the White House blog, Jones' duties include helping to craft job-generating climate policy and to ensure equal opportunity in the administration's energy proposals. Jones, formerly a self-described "rowdy black nationalist," boasted in a 2005 interview with the left-leaning East Bay Express that his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class "justice." Jones was president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit organization that advocates building a so-called inclusive green economy. Until recently, Jones was a longtime member of the board of Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environmental and community leaders that claims on its website to be "working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs." He was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The organization had its roots in a grouping of black people organizing to protest the first Gulf War. STORM was formally founded in 1994, becoming one of the most influential and active radical groups in the San Francisco Bay area. STORM worked with known communist leaders. It led the charge in black protests against various issues, including a local attempt to pass Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that sought to increase the penalties for violent crimes and require more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. The leftist blog Machete 48 identifies STORM's influences as "third-worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism)." Speaking to the East Bay Express, Van Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist." "I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary," he said. Trevor Loudon, a communist researcher and administrator of the New Zeal blog, identified several Bay Area communists who worked with STORM, including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones' Ella Baker Human Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and Martinez also attended a "Challenging White Supremacy" workshop together. Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, or CCDS, in the early 1990s, according to Loudon. Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former Weathermen radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. One of STORM's newsletters featured a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands. The tribute is noteworthy because Jones reportedly named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the communist leader. STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering among its leaders. Van Jones then moved on to environmentalism. He used his Ella Baker Center to advocate "inclusive" environmentalism and launch a Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, which led to the nation's first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, Calif. At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007, Jones announced the establishment of Green For All, an activist organization which in 2008 held a national green conference in which most attendees were black. Jones also released a book, "The Green Collar Economy," which debuted at No.12 on the New York Times' bestseller list – the first environmental book written by an African American to make the list. His appointment as a White House environmental adviser was announced March 10.
Glenn Beck Boycott: Censorship or Good Citizenship? Politics Daily
Politics Daily
Posted:
08/18/09
So, the number of corporate sponsors that have pulled their advertising dollars from The Glenn Beck Program grew to 20 on Tuesday. Walmart, Best Buy and Travelocity joined the list of companies that, depending on your point of view, should be classified as either responsible corporate citizens or easily bullied cowards.
The statements of the corporations themselves tend to confirm the second option. But first the background:
Glenn Beck is a conservative commentator whose television show airs at 5 p.m. daily Eastern Time on the Fox News Channel, where it attracts an enormous (for cable, at that hour) audience of some 2.3 million souls. His audience has exploded this year, apparently riding a tide of conservative resentment over the poor economy, the supposedly liberal media, and Democratic Party control in Washington.
"You are not alone," Beck tells his viewers. Millions of people like to hear such assurances, even when coming from a polished performer whose histrionics are obvious. Beck doesn't mind crying on the air. His soliloquies range in tone from rants to raves, often spiced with a dash of paranoia. Recent Beck-isms include a claim that the U.S. Mercury dime has a secret fascist symbol on it, that FEMA was secretly setting up concentration camps, that global warming is fiction, and that a single-payer health care system is the first step to a society being forced to "goose-step."
Earlier this year, Beck compared himself in an interview with The New York Times to Howard Beale, the unglued anchorman in the 1976 classic movie, "Network." Beale was famous for saying that he was "mad as hell" and wasn't going to take it anymore. But Beck's persona has a quite un-mad aspect to it. As it happens, driving progressive Democrats cuckoo is quite profitable – and fairly easy to do these days. In that same interview with The Times, Beck volunteered that he is like a "rodeo clown," dancing in front of the (liberal) bulls and broncos for the audience's entertainment.
His Web site advertises Beck as The Fusion of Entertainment and Enlightenment. Human Lightning Rod is more like it. But all of his past comments put together do not equal the furor Beck ignited on July 28, when he accused President Obama of being "a racist." Here is how it went down: Beck and his guest panelists were discussing the controversial arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. – and Obama's ill-fated comments regarding said arrest. That's when Beck began channeling his inner rodeo clown.
Beck: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, I don't know what it is . . ."
At that point, Fox News's Brian Kilmeadeon interjects, pointing out that many of Obama's closest White House advisers are white (he doesn't mention Obama's own mother). "You can't say he doesn't like white people . . ."
Unfazed, Beck replies: "I'm not saying he doesn't he like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist."
To a group called ColorofChange.org, this wasn't entertainment, it was hate speech. ColorofChange.org is an online membership organization that exists, according to its mission statement, "to strengthen Black America's political voice."
The group was founded by Van Jones, who left in 2007 for another activist organization, Green for All, and who now works in the Obama administration as a top adviser on "green" jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Jones' replacement at ColorofChange.org is James Rucker, and he quickly concluded after the Obama-is-a-racist comment that Glenn Beck is an impediment to his organization's objectives and should be removed from the airwaves. His weapon of choice: An e-mail campaign by ColorofChange.org members to advertising agencies and corporate sponsors that advertise on Fox News during the daily Beck hour.
Beck's commentary, Rucker declared, was "repulsive, divisive, and shouldn't be on the air." His effort has met with surprising success. The list of companies that agreed includes Geico, CVS, Men's Wearhouse, Radio Shack, Procter & Gamble, and State Farm Insurance. This is a little strange, even granting Rucker's description of Beck's language being "repulsive" and "divisive." Heck, let's add "witless" and "obviously inaccurate" to the litany. But the phrase "shouldn't be on the air," well now, that is really raising the stakes to the point that we are playing a different kind of game here. So let's also call this burgeoning secondary boycott for what it is: attempted censorship.
"We are heartened to see so many corporate citizens step up in support of our campaign against Glenn Beck," said Rucker, executive director of ColorOfChange.org. "Their action sends a clear a message to Glenn Beck: Broadcasters shouldn't abuse the privilege they enjoy by spewing dangerous and racially charged hate language over the air. No matter their political affiliation, hate language doesn't belong in our national dialogue."
Leaving aside the dated notion that free expression over the airwaves is a "privilege," the problem here is that the outrage against playing the race card in politics is selective. Is it not also repulsive and divisive when Keith Olbermann invites an angry actress named Janeane Garafalo on his show to dismiss conservative protestors as "a bunch of racists?" As Olbermann mumbles audible sounds of encouragement, Garafalo adds: "Let's be very honest about what this is about . . .This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. This is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks."
If you don't remember ColorofChange.org's boycott against Olbermann and NBC, that's because it never happened. Good thing, too, because you can bet some of these cringing companies would have been susceptible to that as well.
"We have instructed our advertising agency to inform Fox to ensure Glenn Beck's program is not part of our advertising plan," Carolyn Castel, a vice president for corporate communications at CVS, one of the 20 Beck boycotters, said in an e-mail to ColorofChange.org. "Our position is simple. We support vigorous debate, especially around policy issues that affect millions of Americans, but we expect it to be informed, inclusive and respectful, in keeping with our company's core values and commitment to diversity."
Really? By that logic, CVS wouldn't be able to advertise on most of the shows on cable television. (Rite Aid, I sense an opening!) But seriously, since when did it become some corporate suit's prerogative to make sure that political discourse on talk shows is politically correct? Are we heading into an era of "red" corporations and "blue" corporations? Travelocity for Democrats and Orbitz for Republicans? (Would James Carville and Mary Matalin even end up on the same flights?)
Many moons ago, I covered a Senate race in which a black North Carolina Democrat named Harvey Gantt tried to unseat Jesse Helms, a white Republican with a deeply conservative record – and one not terribly enlightened on race. Some of the state's Democrats privately urged home state basketball star Michael Jordan to endorse Gantt and maybe even make a television spot. The great symbol of Nike shoes declined, and in doing so, sent word to the Gantt emissaries to the effect that "Republicans buy shoes, too."
At the time, I found Jordan's self-imposed neutrality to be crass. I may have misjudged the man. In his view that corporate profits and politics don't mix, Jordan seems to have been was ahead of his time. Finally, let's contemplate for a moment the likely effects of this Glenn Beck boycott:
(1) More attention, and thus, possibly more viewers for Glenn Beck.
(2) A sympathy backlash (like this column) from people who normally wouldn't dream of defending Glenn Beck, but who will almost always defend free speech.
(3) A backlash boycott against Olbermann, or whomever, on the part of angered conservatives.
(4) The spreading perception that some liberals are often willing to employ tactics that are quite illiberal when it comes to those with whom they disagree.
(5) More opportunity on Beck's show for him to spew goofy opinions, precisely because the advertisers have fled, leaving him with more time to fill.
What Companies are Boycotting?
Below are companies listed on the DefendGlenn site as having joined the Color of Change boycott against Glenn Beck:
Ally Bank
President and CEO Mark B. Hales
(877) 247-2559
6985 Union Park Center
Midvale, Utah 84047
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Broadview Security (Brinks)
Robert B. Allen
(800) 445-0872
8880 Esters Blvd,
Irving, Texas 75063
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CVS Caremark Corp.
Thomas M. Ryan
(401) 765-1500
One CVS Drive
Woonsocket, R.I. 02895
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Geico
Chairman and CEO Tony Nicely
(800) 861-8380
5260 Western Ave.
Chevy Chase, Md. 20815
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Healthy Choice Foods
A subsidiary of
ConAgra Foods Inc.
President and CEO Gary M. Rodkin
(402) 595-4000
1 ConAgra Drive
Omaha, Neb. 68102-5001
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Lawyers.com
A subsidiary of
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell
CEO Andrew Prozes
(800) 526-4902
121 Chanlon Road
New Providence, N.J. 07974
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Men's Wearhouse
Chairman and CEO George Zimmer
(281) 776-7200
6380 Rogerdale Road
Houston, Texas 77072
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Sanofi-Aventis U.S.
President and CEO Gregory Irace
(800) 981-2491
55 Corporate Drive
Bridgewater, N.J. 08807
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Sargento Foods Inc.
Chairman and CEO Louis Gentine
(800) 243-3737
One Persnickety Place
Plymouth, Wis. 53073
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State Farm
Chairman and CEO Edward B. Rust Jr.
(877) 734-2265 (Ask for a “Representative”)
1 State Farm Plaza
Bloomington, Ill. 61710-0001
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