Beck Not Worthy of Sanction - Charlie Warner - MediaBizBloggers

Liberal readers were outraged and conservative readers were supportive of my blog advocating that advertisers not pull their advertising from Glenn Beck's program on Fox News in response to a proposed boycott of their products.

The comments and debate have been filled with intelligent and emotion-filled arguments that seem to boil down to those that want to shut up Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, and the Fox News channel and those that don't want advertisers to kowtow to boycotts or try to stifle free speech.

Of course, the tone of the arguments has been heated up and muddled by Beck's opinion that President Obama is a racist and against the "white culture" – a patently false, insidious, and stupid remark – which Fox News defended as merely Beck's personal opinion.

So my question is this: if advertisers should cancel their advertising in the conservative Beck's controversial television program, should Mutual of America cancel its sponsorship of PBS's "Bill Moyers' Journal," which recently replayed a documentary titled "Critical Condition" that clearly and persuasively advocates in favor of health care reform? Health care reform is a major, divisive political issue, with liberals generally on one side of the line in the sand (the left side, of course) and conservatives on the other side.

Conservatives typically view Bill Moyers as a soft liberal, perhaps less strident than Beck, but idealistically and politically as anathema as Beck and O'Reilly are to liberals. So why aren't conservatives calling for Mutual of America to withdraw its support from "Bill Moyers' Journal" and for other sponsors to pull their support from other PBS or NPR programming?

Perhaps conservative organizations are advocating boycotting PBS, NPR, and MSNBC programming, but I have heard nothing about it. I suspect it is the tone of Beck's stupid racist remark as much as his right-wing rabble rousing and hate mongering against their (and my) beloved Obama that is upsetting liberals, many of whom want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine in an attempt to muzzle Rush Limbaugh, who is distributed on FCC-licensed radio stations.

However, Beck, O'Reilly and Hannity are on Fox News on cable, which is not regulated by the FCC, so they would continue to bloviate even if the ineffective Fairness Doctrine were reinstated (something Obama is on record as being against, and rightly so).

The most insightful comment I received was from conservative friend of mine who was the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division in the George H. W. Bush administration:

"As Justice William O. Douglas once referred in a Supreme Court decision to the Communist Party of the US, the hysterical commentators are, '…the poor peddlers of unwanted wares; their goods remain unsold.' Why bother elevating the focus on these ranters by suggesting they're worthy of sanction?"

Justice Douglas said it much more eloquently than I did. Glenn Beck or O'Reilly or Lou Dobbs or Keith Oldermann are not worthy of sanction.

Until he retired in 2002, Charlie Warner was Vice President of AOL's Interactive Marketing division. Before joining AOL, he was the Goldenson Endowed Professor at the Missouri Journalism School where he taught media management and sales, and he created and ran the annual Management Seminar for News Executives. Charlie can be contacted at charleshwarner@gmail.com.

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