Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The New Yorker is righteously angry at Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck has surpassed Rush Limbaugh for the title of Biggest Scum of the Earth:
A grainy photograph shows a grim-faced, middle-aged man glancing furtively over his shoulder. Who is he? The black background again, and this:


SOURCE: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SOROS
BY CONNIE BRUC,
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23, 1995

More titles, each fading to the next, as the percussive heartbeat grows ominously louder:


EXPOSING GEORGE SOROS
A GLENN BECK SPECIAL EVENT
THE PUPPET MASTER?
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 9TH

Call us oversensitive, but when our efforts are shanghaied like a nineteenth-century sailor and forced to work as a deckhand aboard a ship of lies, we can’t help getting our hackles up. You don’t have to be a professional semiotician to see that the Glenn Beck promo is intended to leave the impression that George Soros, the hedge-fund investor and funder of anti-totalitarian and liberal causes, is an anti-Semite; that he was somehow complicit in the Holocaust; and that he is an enemy of Israel. These are lies—lies told by innuendo, but lies all the same. The promo’s shard of truth is that “The World According to Soros” was indeed published in The New Yorker. Its author was Connie Bruck. (“Bruc” is a Fox flub, not a Fox fib.) The quotes from it, though accurately transcribed, are made to function as lies by being placed in an utterly mendacious context. Bruck’s article is the “source” of these smears only in the sense that the brooks of the Catskills are the “source” of New York City’s sewage.

Read more at the New Yorker