Have a handful of left-wing advocacy groups been able to hurt Fox News’ “Glenn Beck” program by pressuring their advertisers to drop their ads?
Online left-wing news sources are claiming victory after several advertisers – Sargento, GEICO, Lawyers.com, Progressive Insurance, Procter & Gamble, and SC Johnson – have decided to move their spots to other Fox News programming from Beck’s program. However according to Fox News, it’s not costing the network any revenue.
“The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network so there has been no revenue lost,” a Fox News spokesperson told the Business & Media Institute Aug. 12.
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We deeply appreciate your reaching out to us and sharing your comments and concerns about Sargento ads appearing during “The Glenn Beck Show.” We sat down with the marketing department to talk about it and I learned that we buy time periods not specific programs. But in any event, they’ve made the decision to exclude that program from our future ad rotation. Simply stated, Sargento ads won’t be airing during that show. Again, thanks for contacting us.
Pat Lombardo
Sargento Consumer Affairs Department
Sargento did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Business & Media Institute about its decision.
However, there may be more involved to the campaign, as Matthew Vadum reported for the American Spectator on Aug. 12. The campaign to attack Beck through his advertisers was instituted by the activist group Color of Change, as reported by the Business & Media Institute on Aug. 4.
Vadum pointed out that Color of Change has ties to the Obama administration, which Beck has been very critical of since coming to Fox News in early 2009.
“The extremist racial grievance group [Color of Change] isn’t happy that Beck did several news packages on Van Jones, President Obama’s controversial green jobs czar who describes himself as a communist,” Vadum wrote. “Jones is a founding board member of Color of Change, but Color of Change doesn't want you to know that. Maybe having an avowed America-hating radical on the group's board is bad public relations.”
As Vadum discovered, the group that targeted Beck and his advertisers made an effort to hide its prior association with Jones.
“The group deleted references to Jones on its ‘about’ page,” Vadum wrote. “That page used to say, ‘James Rucker and Van Jones came together in the wake of [Hurricane] Katrina to use the organizing power of the Internet to give Black Americans and our allies a renewed and strengthened political voice.’ But now it doesn’t.”
Vadum found that the old page still existed in the Google cache, and created a PDF of the page.) He also procured copies of the 501(c)(4) group’s 2006 and 2007 tax returns (IRS Form 990), which showed the president’s green jobs czar as a director.
Beck has been a thorn-in-the-side for many of Obama’s policies, even reporting on some of the language in the cash-for-clunkers program that could give the federal government unprecedented access to private computers.
