There is a fundamental irony that lies at the heart of Glenn Beck’s media empire, in that it operates under the banner “Truth Lives Here” while Beck himself continues to be a regular source of misinformation and falsehoods.
Nothing better demonstrates this fact that the opening of Beck’s radio program yesterday where he declared that the current measles outbreak is a “hoax” designed increase government control, which he “proved” by reading from a piece posted on 21st Century Wire.
As Beck told it, “if you look at the 102 children in California who have been detected with measles, you look at where they came from, you see that the two cases came from 1) an Amish community and 2) a group of travelers who entered the U.S. from the Philippines. If you eliminate those two sources, there is no uptrend in measles.”
Beck and co-host Pat Gray then went on to assert that even though immigrants from the Philippines are responsible for the measles outbreak, the media won’t report that because their intention is “to make the case that you’ve got to obey the government” and get vaccinated.
“Do everything you can just to obey the government,” Beck said:
As usual, apparently nobody within Beck’s entire company could find five minutes to do some basic research on these claims, because if they had, they would have quickly realized that Beck’s assertions were entirely wrong.
As the CDC explained, there was a large outbreak of measles “among unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio” in 2014, but that outbreak started when “unvaccinated Amish missionaries traveled to the Philippines and returned with the virus.”
The current measles outbreak has literally nothing to do with this 2014 incident and Beck’s assertion that the current outbreak can be tied to “this Filipino family or group of travelers” is entirely false as it was not Filipino tourists who brought the disease into the U.S. but rather unvaccinated Amish missionaries who brought it back to the U.S. from the Philippines in April of last year!
Nothing better exemplifies the true absurdity of Beck’s media empire than the fact that he opened his radio program yesterday by spreading utterly false information while alleging some sort of government conspiracy all while operating under the banner of “Truth Lives Here.”
