Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Glenn Beck: Losing His Mind, And Losing Advertisers

I’ve detailed some of Glenn Beck’s more insane antics in the past — see here, here, here, and here — but here’s a truly bizarre compilation from last week where Beck agrees that Obama is not Hitler, and then proceeds to tell us that Obama is Hitler:



Well, there finally appears to be some indication that Beck is paying a price for his antics:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — In what is shaping up to be one of the more effective boycott campaigns in years, advertisers are abandoning the “Glenn Beck” show on Fox News following the host’s incendiary comments that President Barack Obama is a “racist” and has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”

Among the advertisers to pull spots from the popular cable talk show are Geico, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK .A 101,550, -600.00, -0.59%) (BRK .B 3,329, -26.13, -0.78%) ; Procter & Gamble (PG 51.93, -0.37, -0.71%) ; Sargento Cheese; and Progressive Insurance (PGR 16.26, -0.17, -1.04%) , according to the companies and Color of Change, one group that is organizing a campaign against the program.

Beck, who made the remarks during another Fox News program late last month, is among the network’s biggest draws, pulling in an average of about 2 million viewers. (Fox News is a unit of News Corp. (NWS 12.61, -0.40, -3.08%) , which also owns MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.)

Geico didn’t respond to a request for comment but sent Color of Change an email saying it had “instructed its ad-buying service to redistribute its inventory of rotational spots on [Fox] to their other network programs, exclusive of the Glenn Beck program.”

Privately held Sargento told its media buyer not to put any of its ads in Beck’s show, said a spokeswoman.

“We market our products to people regardless of their political affiliations,” she said. “Yet we do not want to be associated with hateful speech used by either liberal or conservative television hosts.”

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

No comments: