Foxnc
newer content 4/14
4/15 beck tag broken, points here?
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Glenn Beck is accusing Daily Kos Staff Writer Shaun King of being one of "the two main guys" leading a network of "Islamicists, Communists and anti-Americans" as part of a national "anti-police" conspiracy.
You can read all of Shaun’s work covering police brutality for Daily Kos here. Shaun’s work is always supported by facts, often including videos of the violence people of color face at the hands of police every day. 3/15
Last Tuesday, March 17, I received a text message from my friend DeRay McKesson with a YouTube link. Deray asked me to check out the video. I had no idea that I was about to be featured in it.
The video is of Glenn Beck and former NYPD officer John Cardillo uncovering what they purport to be a complex, well-funded conspiracy in Ferguson, Missouri, backed with $33 million from billionaire George Soros with ties to ISIS, communists, and other anti-Americans.By the time they introduced the video in this ridiculous and fanciful way, it already resembled a very bad SNL skit.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/06/790181/-Beck-HUMILIATED-after-efforts-to-get-rid-of-site-parodying-him
both 2009
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/06/777736/-Beck-s-advertisers-time-to-finish-the-job
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Climate News Network [1] / By Tim Radford [2]
Conservatives Don't Like the Message on Climate Change, So They Want to Shoot the Messenger
November 10, 2014 |
If you don’t like the message on climate change [3], it seems that the answer is to shoot the messenger.
According to a new book by veteran environmentalist George Marshall [4], thousands of abusive emails—including demands that he commit suicide or be “shot, quartered and fed to the pigs, along with your family”—were received by climate scientist Michael Mann [5], director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre, who drew and published the “hockey stick graph [6]” that charts a steep rise in global average temperatures.
Glenn Beck, a commentator on Fox TV, called on climate scientists to commit suicide. A climate denial blogger [7] called Marc Morano claimed that one group of climate scientists deserved “to be publicly flogged.” And the late Stephen Schneider found his name and that of other Jewish climate scientists on a “death list” maintained by an American neo-Nazi website.
Very Strange
As Marshall points out in his absorbing, all-embracing, immensely readable book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, something very strange is going on.
Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary microbiology work on disease prevention never resulted in him having to think about how to use a gun. Jonas Salk never needed to fortify his house as result of working on the development of a polio vaccine.
Other scientists are trusted and respected. But the way climate scientists are now treated, Marshall argues, is without parallel in the history of science: “They have been set up to play that role in a climate storyline that, it would seem, cannot refute climate change without demonising the people who warn us about it.”
Forget, if you can, the people who seem to be whipping up these furious responses. Climate change can only be met or mitigated by action—and there are plenty of reasons why a very large number of people nod in agreement about what must be done and then fail to insist that it is done.
Dan Gilbert [8], a psychologist who won the Royal Society’s science book prize in 2007 with an examination of the puzzles of happiness, says that climate change is something unlikely to strike fear in the human heart anyway. It is impersonal, it is gradual, it is amoral and it isn’t—or doesn’t seem to be—happening now.
Other researchers have pointed out the alarming tendency, shared by all humans, to believe what they want to believe. Furthermore, climate change is not (death threats and public flogging fantasies aside) an immediate or an emotional issue. “A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilising public opinion,” says the Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman [9].
There are other difficulties. When, for instance, will the awful things start to happen? How do you mobilise public opinion on an argument with uncertain timescales, imprecise outcomes and real puzzles about the costs and benefits of any actions? No one, Marshall says, is ever going to march under a banner of that says “100 months before the Odds Shift into a Greater Likelihood of Feedbacks.”
Marshall founded the Climate Outreach and Information Network [10] (COIN), based in Oxford, England. He is a veteran of Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation, and there isn’t much doubt about what he thinks and knows to be true.
But the appeal of this book is that he lets others talk. He examines the political doublethink that seems to infect some legislatures in the U.S. He listens to the skeptics [11], the worriers, the oil giants, the conspiracy theorists, the celebrity environmental campaigners and the other ones who invoke imagery of death, fever and smoking ruin.
And he refers to the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute [12], which polled academic experts on global risk, and found an estimate of a “19 percent probability that the human species will go extinct before the end of the century”.
Altruistic Behavior
The title, direction and burden of this book seem to augur almost apocalyptic failure to confront the coming crisis. But, of course, Marshall pulls out an ace near the end.
He concludes that while human brains may be hard-wired to not worry about what may or may not happen in two generations, they also have an immense capacity for pro-social, supportive and altruistic behavior.
“Climate change is entirely within our capacity for change,” he says, “It is challenging, but far from impossible.”
That is good to know. And the book ends with some serious advice about how to make the case for action—and instead of capital punishment, we get generously shouty advice in capital letters. CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW, he reminds us. And he urges campaigners to DROP THE ECO-STUFF, especially the polar bears.
Marshall suggests that we really do try to contain global average warming to 2°C. He quotes John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research [13], who told the Australians:“The difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.” And, yes, do think about it.
Glenn Beck's Saudi Bomber Conspiracy
If the Post's courtroom defense will be that reporters and editors simply followed the lead of law enforcement, what will Glenn Beck's defense be in his Boston bombing-related libel case? Unlike the "BAG MEN" suit and the Post's claim its reporters echoed investigators, Beck repeatedly attacked a 20-year-old Saudi national student living in Boston days after law enforcement had explicitly cleared him [14] of any wrongdoing.
Not surprisingly last month the student, Abdulrahman Alharbi, filed [15] a defamation suit against Beck, his online outlet The Blaze, and his radio syndicator, Clear Channel's Premiere Radio Networks, claiming he was slandered by the talker following the Boston attack. Alharbi accuses [16] Beck of one count of defamation and one count of defamation with malice.
The student at the New England School of English had been injured by the terror blast on Boylston Street last year, was subsequently questioned by police, and then quickly dismissed as having any involvement. But that didn't stop Beck, who for days and weeks publically accused Alharabi of being a key player in the terror plot.
"Beck repeatedly and falsely identified Mr. Alharbi as an active participant, repeatedly questioned the motives of federal officials in failing to pursue or detain Alharbi and repeatedly and falsely accused Mr. Alharbi of being a criminal who had funded the attacks," the lawsuit alleges [17].
Indeed, Beck called the student a "dirt bag [18]," a "bad, bad, bad man [19]," and "possibly the ringleader [20]" of the bombing that killed three people and injured more than two hundred. The host even called for President Obama tobe impeached [21] for what the host considered to be a sprawling [22] government cover-up surrounding the student, Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda.
From [23] the Washington Post:
Beck continued [24] days later: "While the media continues to look at what the causes were [behind] these two guys, there are, at this hour, three& people involved,"
[25], alleging the U.S. government had "tagged" Alharbi as a "proven terrorist."
The broadcaster eventually called Alharbi an al Qaeda "control agent" and the "money man" behind the attacks. "You know who the Saudi is?" Beck asked [26]. "He's the money man. He's the guy who paid for it."
Will Beck opt for an opinion defense and suggest his Saudi national comments were rhetorical and never meant to be taken seriously? It might be his only option.
National Review's "Climategate" Coverage
Unlike the two Boston bombing cases, the libel suit filed against National Review, as well as the conservative think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), involves a plaintiff who is likely considered to be a public figure, Penn State professor Michael Mann. Yet despite the higher burden of proof associated with that type of case, it continues to progress, surviving the Review's attempts to have it thrown out.
"I wouldn't want to be the defendant in the Mann suit," says media law professor Drechsel, noting the suit's survival to this point must be "worrisome" to National Review. "Even if Mann is a public figure and he has to prove what was published was known to be false and represented a reckless disregard for the truth, there's still a lot of disconcerting evidence there," says the libel expert.
In 2009, Mann found himself at the center of the so-called "Climategate [27]" scandal when more than 1,000 emails were stolen from Britain's University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, one of the world's leading climate research institutions. Based on a gross misrepresentation [28] of one of the emails, conservative critics [29] falsely portrayed [30] Mann as having corruptly manipulated his research to find evidence of global warming. The next year Penn State cleared [31] Mann of any academic misconduct; at least six other institutions, including the Environmental Protection Agency [32], have conducted [33] their own reviews of Mann's work and found no wrongdoing.
Fast forward to 2012 when Penn State became embroiled in allegations that the university had ignored or concealed evidence that longtime football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky had been molesting children. That July, Rand Simberg blogged [34] at CEI that Mann was "the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data." (That sentence has since been removed from the post.) Over at National Review Online, Rush Limbaugh's fill-in host Mark Steyn quoted the "Jerry Sandusky" smear, writing [35], "Not sure I'd have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr Simberg does, but he has a point."
When Mann demanded retractions and apologies for the Sandusky attack and for claiming he faked his scientific research, CEI and National Review refused. A lawsuit was subsequently filed.
Last July, Judge Combs Greene of the D.C. Superior Court denied [36] the defendants' motion to dismiss the suit as frivolous. Then in January [33], D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick Weisberg did the same [37]:
Accusing a scientist of conducting his research fraudulently, manipulating his data to achieve a predetermined or political outcome, or purposefully distorting the scientific truth are factual allegations. They go to the heart of scientific integrity. They can be proven true or false. If false, they are defamatory. If made with actual malice, they are actionable.
Frederick concluded [33] that "a reasonable jury" might "find the statement that Dr. Mann 'molested and tortured data' was false, and published with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for whether it was false or not." Steyn hasn't been published at NRO since last year and has since countersued [38] Mann; in a January blog post [39] on his own website, he wrote that his "absence at National Review Online and my termination of our joint representation" were due to "differences between me and the rest of the team."
Unless settlements are reached or the cases eventually thrown out, representatives for The New York Post, National Review and Glenn Beck will be forced to defend their clients in front of juries with the threat of defamation damages looming large. That's the possible price you pay when standards become submerged.
See more stories tagged with:
libel [40],
slander [41],
law suits [42],
glenn beck [43],
Michael E. Mann [44],
climate change [45],
climate change deniers [46],
new york post [47],
Abdulrahman Alharbi [48],
islamophobia [49],
climategate [50]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/libel-will-defamation-suits-doom-three-right-wing-media-outlets