Bloggasm

For an article on The Moderate Voice, I interviewed Angelo Carusone, a Media Matters employee who has spent virtually every day for over a year methodically pressuring hundreds of advertisers into dropping Glenn Beck:

The “campaign” he referred to was Stop Beck, a project he launched in July of 2009, inspired in part by the success of a civil rights group called Color of Change in getting advertisers to back away from Beck. Carusone was a University of Wisconsin law student at the time and the dedication and discipline in how he approached the project was impressive: Every day he’d pick a new Beck advertiser and start a slow and steady drumbeat on Twitter and Facebook to pressure it to drop Beck. Within months he had amassed thousands of fans and followers, and many of them would flood the Facebook walls of these major companies and publish hundreds of @ replies aimed at their Twitter accounts, making it nearly impossible for the advertiser to ignore the complaints. While of course some silently withdrew their support, many of them publicly announced that they would no longer sponsor Beck on any platform. Though it’s difficult to discern how many sponsors had dropped Beck, many journalists pegged the number at over 300, and in the UK his program was running without any outside advertisers at all. It wasn’t long after Stop Beck launched that the only advertisers on the show were less reputable ones, like the Superior Gold Group, which had its assets frozen recently by a judge in California. “The week when they made the announcement [of Beck's departure] I was just making some final touches on some data, and what the data showed was that for the few advertisers who were running on Beck who had ads running elsewhere on Fox News — the same ads from the same advertiser would get anywhere from three to eight times more money on another Fox News show. Mind you they tout how great Glenn Beck’s ratings are, and yet he’s getting grossly lower rates than any other comparable show on Fox.” It also became hard after awhile to measure how many advertisers were steering clear of Beck, since some of them were doing so preemptively. “That was in part because we were very proactive in communicating to media buying agencies in the hope they would prevent for their own client the blowback of advertising on Beck,” he said. “So instead of going after one advertiser at a time, we tried to convince a media buying agency that Beck was a toxic place to advertise.”

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Much is being made today about another conservative “sting” video produced by James O’Keefe. In it, two people pretending to be affiliated with a fake Muslim organization accompany two NPR fundraisers to lunch, both of whom are under the false impression that the organization wants to donate $5 million to NPR.

As is usual with O’Keefe’s videos, they’re heavily edited, play to conservative scare tactics, and leave out pertinent information. In the video, one of the NPR execs offers several political opinions about the Tea Party and conservatives, most of which are negative. He compares climate deniers to flat earthers. He appears marginally sympathetic to the Muslim world.

So what? The guy is a fundraiser, not a journalist. Name me one person currently working for an organization that accepts federal money who doesn’t have a political opinion. If I lure a police officer to a restaurant and secretly tape him bashing conservatives, should we defund the police force?

The NPR exec also doesn’t express outrage when the “Muslims” offer up some slightly more radical views. O’Keefe and his conservative accomplices use this silence as somehow suggesting that he agrees with these radical views. Anyone who has ever nodded politely while a crazy old man rants belligerently knows it’s simply human nature to avoid conflict.

NPR said in a statement that it rejected the fake check offered by the fake Muslim organization. If true, then James O’Keefe is engaging in extreme intellectual dishonesty by not including this fact in his video.

I also want to point out that these conservative hit jobs are incredibly disrespectful in that they waste their targets’ time. What if the NPR execs had gone to the lunch and had said nothing remotely political? James O’Keefe wouldn’t have published the video, but he would have still wasted several hours of NPR’s time. For what? So he could score a few cheap political points by lying to them? There is no law that says you can’t lure a company’s employee to lunch by lying and telling him you’re going to donate money to his organization. But that doesn’t make you any less of an asshole for wasting that person’s time under false pretenses. These NPR executives are not monkeys that are there to play in James O’Keefe’s political theater.

I’ll tell you what, O’Keefe. You get an NPR executive on tape saying he’ll give you favorable news coverage in exchange for $5 million. Then I’ll join your call for defunding NPR. But until then, you’re just an asshole who conned some polite people into humoring you.

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The internet hactivist group Anonymous first gained mainstream attention when it targeted Scientology, disabling its websites and staging mass protests. It also engaged in dozens of smaller skirmishes, carrying out a kind of vigilante justice on a number of individuals, at one point even launching a Denial of Service attack at Gawker. In most instances, there seemed to be no political motives other than protecting freedom of speech.

But in recent weeks it has become one of the prime defenders of Wikileaks, completely disrupting the website’s antagonists — Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard — and arguably ruining the career of a security consultant who had been planning how to take down the whistleblower website. And then today we learn that the group has taken down the Americans for Prosperity website, citing the Koch brothers in the process:

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

…Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system.

If the group becomes increasingly politicized, will it lose some of its allure with its supporters? And if it did, would it even care?

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Following the news that CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been the victim of a brutal sexual assault by a mob in Egypt, conservative bloggers covered the incident with the gravity and respect it deserved.

In a post titled “Disgusting but predictable: Muslims rape CBS reporter in Egypt,” conservative blogger Kathy Shaidle wrote, “Looks like Anderson Cooper got lucky (or not.)” (emphasis mine)

Translation: Anderson Cooper, who is widely known to be gay, would have considered himself lucky to be sexually assaulted by a mob of Muslims.

Not to be outdone, the conservative Ace of Spades — who receives over 100,000 pageviews a day — said that he was “weary of a barbaric desert nomad culture of rape and outrage while carrying around a ton of chip-on-the-shoulder arrogance-hiding-profound-insecurity about it all.”

And just in case you’re confused as to what he was referring to, he added, “oh right, a thousand years ago they invented algebra. So, like, they should keep doing victory laps over that.” Yes, he means Arabs. This is the same guy who said Obama “is pretty much exactly the same kind of socialist race hustler as Jesse Jackson. Everyone swears he’s not Jesse Jackson. But he is.”

Nothing like the sexual assault of a woman to spur on some racism and homophobia.

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I’m guessing that the Daily Beast doesn’t have a copy editor, otherwise this wouldn’t be noteworthy, not that it is anyway.

From Meghan McCain’s recent column:

Everyone from Jessica Simpson to Tyra Banks, Oprah and Hillary Clinton has fallen victim to this type of image-oriented bullying.

UPDATE: In case it isn’t clear, I’m giving McCain kudos for correct grammar, not saying that it’s incorrect.

Which reminds me of this tshirt I’ve been meaning to buy:

That’s conservative blogger Michelle Malkin posing for a photo with a man holding a swastika Obama sign

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the history of the National Review, but I’ve seen claims that at some point it was some kind of haven for conservative intellectual thought (though the biased part of me remains skeptical of whether this was ever true). That being said, I’d like to think I’m being unbiased when I echo the thoughts of many that in recent years the publication has been an anti-intellectual sewer only a step above sites like Perez Hilton or The Free Republic. Glenn Greenwald details a recent episode — not solitary by any means — in which the publication just outright refused to print a correction in a timely manner.