If Glenn Beck had only sprung into action a little sooner, perhaps he could have saved the day for NPR. It seems a strange thing to say, but it’s only the latest surprise out of perhaps the most unpredictable of cable news channel hosts.
The man who, until recently, has routinely insisted he's not a journalist finds himself being praised by reputable media outlets -- including the Prospect -- for a bit of media watchdogging (albeit done by his team, with his permission) on his website, The Blaze. The review undertaken by his staff of the raw video compared to the 11-minute final product showed how James O‘Keefe (once again) selectively edited video that led to the firings of two NPR executives last week.
Launched by Beck in September 2010, The Blaze bills itself as a “news, information and opinion site” with the goal “to post, report and analyze stories of interest on a wide range of topics from politics and culture to faith and family.” With NPR thanking Beck and the site for proving that O‘Keefe was wrong and AP citing The Blaze on this story, Beck and The Blaze seem to be getting credit as a legitimate news outlet.
And Beck is talking the talk. When he returned to the air on Monday (he was on vacation when this all went down), he told his listeners that engaging in this type of video “journalism” is “not something that you necessarily want to get into. But if you do it, you damn well better not lie on the tape. You don't now take what you have and edit something to make them say something that they didn't say. I mean, you have no credibility then.”
Of course, all of this is at least a little ironic given Beck's own difficult relationship with the truth.
As Angelo Carusone, who directs the DropFox campaign at Media Matters, points out that “Beck identifying the problems in O'Keefe's latest video doesn't erase his past reliance on artfully edited videos in order to smear an opponent” and that “Beck's own pattern of deceit is well-established.”
Carusone, who ingests four hours of Beck each day and catalogs the egregious claims he makes on his radio and television shows, says, “For example, he repeatedly falsely claimed that [President Barack Obama’s science and technology adviser] John Holdren ‘proposed’ putting sterilants in drinking water for forced abortions as a mechanism for population control.”
Beck's newfound praise is troubling for Carusone, who says it's a matter of “allowing Beck to exploit the praise in order to sanitize his own demonstrated pattern of deceit.”
It's one thing to acknowledge that Beck was critical of O'Keefe's latest doctored video, but Carusone says it's another to legitimize The Blaze, which “means placing Beck's O'Keefe remarks in the context of Beck's significant role in propagating right-wing misinformation on his radio, Fox News, and Internet platforms.”
But Carusone hasn't totally ruled out the possibility that The Blaze could play an important role in media watchdog operations, and he's even happy to assist them with that venture, if they're serious.
“If The Blaze is really interested in watchdog work,” says Carusone, “I would be more than happy to provide them with a list of Glenn Beck's recent falsehoods, so they can set the record straight.”
Allen McDuffee is a New York-based independent journalist and blogs at Think Tanked. He is guest-blogging for TAPPED this week.
