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WHITE HOUSE OUT TO GET GLENN BECK

Aug. 14, 2009 10:05 AM ET46 Comments
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The Obama White House is out to get Glenn Beck under the guise of an organization called COLOR OF CHANGE. They are putting pressure on sponsors to pull their ads from the Glenn Beck show. Geico, owned by Obama supporter Warren Buffett, has pulled their ads. I wonder who runs COLOR OF CHANGE. How about James Rucker and Van Jones. Rucker was an architect of MoveOn.org that non-partisan group. Jones is the White House Czar for Green Jobs and self described Communist. This is how it works in our country today. Special interest groups in conjunction with politicians and corporations think they can squelch free speech and the truth.

I urge everyone to give them a dose of their own medicine. Flood the Color of Change website with spam and emails telling them what you think of their terrorist tactics. Please watch the Glenn Beck show, so that his ratings go up dramatically. Stop using GEICO insurance. Don't buy any Procter and Gamble products. Generics are just as good and cheaper. Don't buy Sargento cheese or use Progressive insurance.

Don't let this racist organization censor Glenn Beck. It is time to stand up to these communists before it is too late.

James Rucker, 36, is a veteran leader of online activism. As Grassroots Mobilization Director, Rucker helped MoveOn.org grow into a powerful 3.3 million-member organization. MoveOn's mission is to return political influence to where its supposed to be in a democracy - everyday people - instead of moneyed special interests and corporations. He grew up in Seaside, California and received a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

Van Jones, 37, is the founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC). Under Jones' leadership, EBC has grown from a small local non-profit to a leading organization in the national fight for alternatives to the "incarceration industry." Jones is also a leader in the push to integrate the environmental movement with other social justice movements. On March 10, 2009, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) announced Jones' appointment as Special Advisor on Green Jobs for the CEQ. By his own account and international reporting, Jones evolved as a "roudy [Black] nationalist" collaborating as an avowed Communist with radical Marxists and Maoists[4]. Appointed as a so-called "green czar" among the officials President Obama has installed in his government avoiding advice and consent of the Senate, Jones was reported in August 2009 for his controversial role in attacking critics of the Obama Administration. After Glenn Beck, a cable TV commentator, [5]reported about the "Apollo Alliance" involving Jones among others as key architects of deficit-creating "recovery" and "cap and trade" legislation -- a group called "Color of Change" founded by Jones began pressuring advertisers to remove advertising from Beck's popular cable program.[6]

Advertisers deserting Fox News' Glenn BeckCable host calls Obama 'racist' and sponsors move to distance themselves
Explore related By William Spain, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- In what is shaping up to be one of the more effective boycott campaigns in years, advertisers are abandoning the "Glenn Beck" show on Fox News following the host's incendiary comments that President Barack Obama is a "racist" and has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."

Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway /quotes/comstock/13*!brk.a (BRK .A 102,150, 0.00, 0.00%) /quotes/comstock/13*!brk.b (BRK .B 3,355, 0.00, 0.00%) , Procter & Gamble /quotes/comstock/13*!pg/quotes/nls/pg (PG 52.78, +0.48, +0.92%) , Sargento Cheese and Progressive Insurance /quotes/comstock/13*!pgr/quotes/nls/pgr (PGR 16.34, -0.09, -0.55%) , according to the companies and Color of Change, one group that is organizing a campaign against the program.

Fox News Network
Glenn Beck.

Beck, who made the remarks during another Fox News program late last month, is among the network's biggest draws, pulling in an average of about 2 million viewers. (Fox News is a unit of News Corp. /quotes/comstock/15*!nws/quotes/nls/nws (NWS 12.95, -0.06, -0.46%) , which also owns MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.)

Geico didn't respond to request for comment but sent Color Of Change an email saying it had "instructed its ad-buying service to redistribute its inventory of rotational spots on [Fox] to their other network programs, exclusive of the Glenn Beck program."

Privately-held Sargento told its media buyer not to put any of its ads in Beck's show, said a spokeswoman.

"We market our products to people regardless of their political affiliations," she said. "Yet we do not want to be associated with hateful speech used by either liberal or conservative television hosts."

Because of the way ad time is often bought on cable -- in bulk and with an eye towards day parts and demographics -- some of the targeted companies' ads may well have ended up on the program by mistake and in violation of their own standards. If so, it was an error that some advertisers vowed not to repeat.

"We place advertising on a variety of programming with the goal of reaching a broad range of insurance consumers who might be interested in our products," said a spokeswoman for Progressive. "We also seek to avoid advertising on programming that our customers or potential customers may find extremely offensive."

The Glenn Beck Show wasn't "targeted," she added and "any advertising that may have appeared on the show was a result of an error."

P&G didn't respond to a request for comment but one news report quoted a spokesperson as saying that "at times our ads are run by mistake on shows that they were not meant to" and that the company would "try to be more careful in the future."

Color of Change is using a 600,000-member electronic mail list to urge people to sign a petition that is then forwarded to Beck's sponsors. The group was founded in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster to promote "racial progress," said James Rucker, executive director, adding that this was the first time the group had been involved in any action of this kind.

"We have seen rhetoric that is destructive and divisive before, but taking a platform that is supposed to be for news and analysis and using it to stoke racial animosity just crossed the line," Rucker said.

The group also contacts the advertisers directly but has yet to call on its members to boycott their products or bombard them with phone calls, Rucker said, instead giving companies the opportunity "to be responsible corporate citizens."

Rucker added that he "absolutely expects" other advertisers to follow suit and drop out because the wave of defections "raises the stakes for them to stick around."

For its part, Fox News said through a spokeswoman that while some advertisers have "removed their spots from Beck," they have just shifted to "other programs on the network so there has been no revenue lost."

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