Last week, the city of Salem, Massachusetts canceled a contract that it had with a local Christian college because the school prohibits “homosexual behavior.” Since 2008, Salem had allowed the college to maintain a local landmark in exchange for being able to use it for educational purposes. After the contract was ended, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze website wrote about the decision, which resulted in Salem’s mayor being inundated with calls after the number to her office was posted in the comments section of The Blaze article.
The mayor then wrote a Facebook post noting that “apparently, Glenn Beck is not happy about the city’s stance” and pledged to donate $5 for every angry call about it that she received.
Since then, various articles have been written about the flap, with some mistakenly attributing the entire thing directly to Glenn Beck … and Beck is not happy about it, blasting the media on his radio program today for being too lazy to bother tracking down and understanding the origin of the story before reporting it:
While Glenn has grown accustomed to reading media reports about him that are less than truthful, he found it difficult to understand how any purported news source could use an un-attributed Facebook post as the basis of a report without so much as a fact-check.
“They got this from a Facebook post as a source. That’s not a typo. You didn’t hear that in error. Reuters wrote a story about a Facebook post. They didn’t call us for comment. They didn’t search to see if I had ever said anything about the story,” Glenn explained. “Because of this, dozens of outlets ran with my supposed opposition to something I don’t even know about. That’s how bad our media is today… They are using Facebook posts as legitimate sources without calling for any secondary source.”
Allow us to point out that this is the same Glenn Beck who routinely pulls random items that have been posted by bloggers on The Huffington Post and attributes them to the Huffington Post itself so that he can rail that America “is just begging to be destroyed.”
Not to mention that Beck’s radio program is the sort of reliable media outlet that will spend an entire segment declaring that America must be destroyed for re-electing President Obama and building that case by falsely attributing a manufactured quote to Valerie Jarrett:
It was this supposed quote from Jarrett that demonstrated, for Beck, the fundamentally evil nature of the entire Obama administration, and he had it read out repeatedly during the segment – here is the quote:
After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time. Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay.
It was this quote that prompted Beck to proclaim that America was on the verge of reaping God’s wrath … but where did it come from? The quote is posted on all sorts of conservative websites and blogs, but they all eventually link back to a blog called The Ulsterman Report.
And where did “Ulsterman” get this quote? From an pseudonymous source he calls “Wall Street Insider” who claims to have received it from a source he supposedly has within the Obama campaign in Chicago … The “Wall Street Insider” then forwarded a message supposedly written by the mole inside the Obama campaign which contains the quote that so outraged Beck.
…
Let’s get this straight: an anonymous source supposedly within the Obama campaign supposedly overheard a representative from Jarrett’s office make this statement and attributed it to Jarrett herself; it was then passed along to some pseudonymous source named “Wall Street Insider” who then forwarded it to The Ulsterman Report … and it eventually ended up on Glenn Beck’s radio program where the quote was treated as entirely legitimate and a sign that America deserves to be destroyed.
We can fully understand why Glenn Beck is so furious that some in the media are willing to blindly report items “without so much as a fact-check” given that throwing out wild and entirely unverified allegations is his area of expertise!
