Who's Really Behind the Glenn Beck Boycott?

Boycotts could be considered an All American protest. The act of refusing to purchase the goods or services of a targeted product pre-dates the republic, with angry colonists refusing to buy tea following the British Parliament’s enactment of the 1773 Tea Act. What made this boycott so extraordinary is that tea was not simply an item on the shelf of colonial cupboards; it was a staple, a part of the culture that English settlers brought with them to the New World.

Fast forward 237 years to the most recent boycott making news in the colonies – the boycott of the Glenn Beck Show. As many as several hundred companies that buy advertising have decided to spend their ad dollars elsewhere, Apple said to be among the most recent high-profile corporations to assume such a position.

It’s not as if a multitude of organizations has risen to demand a boycott of Beck’s product. Much of the noise is emanating from the organization Color of Change, a relatively new left-of-center non-profit whose name appears to seek linkage with President Obama’s political agenda.

The most recent boycott demand is from a fellow named the Rev. Jim Wallis, who leads a group called the Sojourners. Rev. Wallis decreed that Christians should not watch Beck’s show any more because the Fox host stated that the progressive catch phrase “social justice” is nothing more than code for communism and Nazism.

Media boycotts come and go, and the reasonable first question in most cases is ‘why’? Why boycott Beck? It’s not as if he’s the most watched show on the Fox News Channel because he’s not. He pulls very strong numbers in his time slot but Bill O’Reilly has more viewers overall, according to the most recent ratings.

Boycotts are generally motivated by one or more of three principle drivers: outrage, fear and economics. One could make the argument that the ad boycott of Beck is simple a business decision. Companies are routinely hit with demands by fringe groups to do this or that for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, which is a business decision. In a departure from many such past movements to boycott a show, the flight of sponsors from the Beck program is significant enough to have migrated from the political and cultural news pages to the editorial desks of business news outlets. So perhaps this is simple economics.

But business decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. There must be something to prompt a company into a particular mode of action. Could the boycott campaign of a relatively unknown group really be responsible for all this corporate board room discussion over which news shows to advertise on?

Perhaps. Color of Change may be a relative Johnny Come Lately to the non-profit world but its management is not. The executive director and co-founder of Color of Change Dot Org is James Rucker, an alumnus of the notorious George Soros-funded MoveOn.org. During his tenure at MoveOn.org, Rucker was credited with directing the group’s grassroots mobilization effort and is said to have been, “instrumental in developing and executing on fundraising, technology, and campaign strategies.”

If I needed a guy to gin-up a corporate pressure campaign to get advertisers to boycott a broadcast product, I’d look real hard at Rucker because the man certainly has the resume. I’d also flog the heck out of that effort in my direct mail and other fundraising efforts. Contributors like to see results and if a group can take credit for pressuring Apple or any other big name company to alter its marketing and advertising plans, I would take out a loan to buy stamps for the Mother of All Mail Drops.

Whether these boycotting advertisers are facing some sort of Jacksonesque shakedown is unclear. What is clear is that whatever is happening is working. But again, the unanswered question is, ‘why Beck?” The man is clearly speaking some truth to some power. It’s unlikely that casual observers would get their knickers in a twist over a TV show host. In this particular case, my bet is that the call for boycotting Beck is based largely on fear of the man and somebody wants to use economic pressure to silence him.

Consider the proximate reasons for the outrage over Beck. Of late, it was from a left of center reverend who took umbrage over equating “social justice” with communism. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, a liberal is somebody who has read Karl Marx while a conservative is somebody who understands what Marx wrote. Anybody who knows anything about contemporary politics knows that Beck is essentially right. The same people who promote “social justice” are invariably the same people calling for redistribution of wealth, which basically defines communism. Beck may be bombastic and provocative but on this point, he’s not wrong.

The other proximate cause for boycotting Beck is that he called the president a racist and accused him of having a “deep-seated hatred of white people.” That’s much tougher because it involves examining the heart and mind of a person, an opportunity for which Beck presumably has not availed himself. However, there has been criticism of the president for the phrase in his memoir that “white folk’s greed runs a world in need,” which has also become a popular sound bite lifted from the audio version of the book.

Whether such a line constitutes racism is difficult to say. Defenders will argue the man was simply quoting a third party while detractors will say that the mere act of utilizing the phrase is over the line because of its content. One possible litmus test might be to ask what would happen had the line been written by a Republican rather than a Democrat but even that would be speculative until a Republican was actually stupid enough to write such a thing.

It’s also instructive to note that, following Rev. Wallis’s call for a boycott, other religious leaders are weighing in with less strident positions. The Associated Baptist Press reports that while Beck’s choice of words regarding social justice may not be entirely articulate some Baptists believe there is something to be said for his underlying meaning.

My guess is that Beck is on to something and that some people are terrified of it. Other broadcasters have made note of the president’s first book and its contents, yet they are not the targets of a boycott. They also do not use this and other mechanisms to expound on the nature of the liberal agenda to the extent that Beck does. Whether the boycott produces its desired result remains to be seen. But if it works with Beck, it’s a sure bet we’ll see the same tactics used on others with whom liberals disagree.