NB's Noel Sheppard on 'Glenn Beck' Dissects Anatomy of Left-wing Smear Job

NewsBusters Associate Editor Noel Sheppard appeared on the March 10 "Glenn Beck" program on CNN Headline News to discuss the left-wing Web's recent smear of the radio host. Beck was taken out of context for comments he made about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). [See Sheppard's related March 8 blog entry here.]

Video (4:18): Windows Media (15.7 MB), plus MP3 audio (1.94 MB).

Here's the transcript:

GLENN BECK, host: Noel Sheppard is the associate editor of newsbusters.org, a conservative watchdog of the liberal blogs. Noel, you apparently did a Google search on this story. How out there is my bigotry?

NOEL SHEPPARD, Associate Editor, NewsBusters.org: Well, I Googled "Glenn Beck," "Obama" and "Anti-Christ," and I got 744,000 hits. Now, that doesn't mean that there's been 744,000 articles already written about this. That`s a little bit nuts.

BECK: Yes.

SHEPPARD: But it is somewhat disturbing to imagine that many Google hits...

BECK: Right.

SHEPPARD: ... incorporating your name, Obama and the Antichrist.

BECK: Right.

SHEPPARD: How does it feel to be a bigot? It's amazing.

BECK: It feels pretty predictable. It feels pretty -- I`m used to being a conservative.

SHEPPARD: Well, the beauty is you did predict it, so that`s what`s wonderful about all of this.

BECK: So you also looked at the word count. And I find this incredibly fascinating. Tell me about the word count.

SHEPPARD: Yeah. I mean, basically what happened to you, Glenn, is you got cherry picked. And what that means is the question that you asked Pastor Hagee had a total of 80 words in it. Well, what Think Progress did is they transcribed 21 words. And what's interesting is they even missed a couple of important words in the little snippet that they took, if I can share with you.

BECK: Wow. Yeah.

SHEPPARD: You had said, "There are people -- and they said this about Bill Clinton -- that actually believe he might be the Antichrist." Well, they transcribed that as, "There are people -- they say about Bill Clinton he might be the Antichrist." So they took out "that actually believe," which radically changes the whole context of the joke you were making.

BECK: No. No. Please. Media Matters -- let me -- let me switch gears here. I don't know if you've ever heard that Hillary Clinton helped start Media Matters. And I don't want to just throw things out higgily-piggily. I happen to have a pretty good source on this one. Could you roll the tape please?

SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D-N.Y.), presidential candidate: Institutions that I helped to start and support, like Media Matters and Center for American Progress.

BECK: All right. They deny that she had anything to do with Hillary Clinton -- or that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with Media Matters. Do I have that one right? That she`s claiming she helped but they`re saying, hey, there`s no connection here?

SHEPPARD: Yeah. I mean, where that occurred was on August 4th of last year at the YearlyKos Convention in, I believe, Chicago. And she was speaking in front of all these quote "progressives," which is code for extreme liberals. And she bragged about the fact that she had helped create the Center for American Progress and Media Matters. And basically the context there is she was talking about how the left is doing a better job of countering the quote unquote "conservative media."

BECK: Yeah. I know, that kills me every time. Noel, thank you very much. I appreciate it. I just want to make this one thing very, very clear. The right, they have blogs that do the same kind of things. The difference is conservative bloggers are never quoted in The New York Times as fact. I`m just saying.

Update I: The good folks at Think Progress are enjoying our coverage. :-)

What I particularly like is the differing results folks are getting concerning the Googling of "Glenn Beck," "Obama," and "Anti-Christ." Like many Google searches, your results depend on how you spell Anti-Christ. If you do it without the hyphen, you get 162,000. However, if you include the hyphen, you currently get 1,260,000 hits, up more than 500,000 from yesterday morning.

Which is the preferred spelling? Well, it appears most dictionaries prefer hyphenless. However, AntiChrist by itself received 4,610,000 hits, while Anti-Christ garnered 6,150,000. As such, it appears more people use the hyphen than not, thereby explaining the far greater results for "Glenn Beck," "Obama," and "Anti-Christ."