The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 60 Comments

Back in the Day: Andrew Breitbart was a guest on Glenn Beck’s Fox News show

In April 2011, Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported that Glenn Beck had been accused of using bloggers’ content without attribution:

Mandy Nagy, a conservative blogger known online as Liberty Chick, spent untold hours last fall creating a chart that tracks left-wing billionaire George Soros’s influence over media organizations, only to see it appear, in its exact form and without any attribution, on Beck’s famous chalkboard. “We were laughing that he went to all the trouble of [recreating] the visual on the blackboard,” Nagy said, not sounding entirely amused.
John Sexton, who blogs at VerumSerum.com, has provided Beck with material several times, and has sometimes received credit for it. But in several other cases, Sexton says, “he’s used our stuff without any hat tip at all. I don’t understand that.” According to Sexton, in one instance even famously liberal CBS News credited VerumSerum.com for content it used, while Beck, who lifted the same material, did not.
Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com recalls watching Beck use a story she wrote about campaign contributions the Obama campaign received from donors in Gaza. Many other publications referred to the story, Geller says, but only Beck refused to give her credit for it.
“I went through thousands of pages of FEC documents and it was an enormous task to uncover the campaign contributions from Gaza, a Hamas-controlled area, to President Obama,” Geller says. “It’s in my book and it wasn’t a secret that I wrote the story. I don’t know how to describe such outrageous and proud thievery. I like his work, but he’s a thief.”

You can read the whole thing. Let’s be clear that Glenn Beck is certainly not the only broadcaster or journalist who has been accused of failing to give adequate credit to the work of others, and bloggers especially get used to being shortchanged by the big shots.

That April 2011 article, however, was sort of an Empire Strikes Back episode in what became a widespread backlash against Beck after he had a falling-out with Andrew Breitbart. And this is relevant now because, as I reported Christmas Eve, “people are telling me that it was Glenn Beck who wanted to hire Dana Loesch away from Breitbart.com,” and Dana has filed a federal lawsuit against Breitbart.com.

Let’s be clear (a) there’s a whole lot of backstory to this, which may never be entirely known, and (b) I cannot verify that there were actually any negotiations between Dana and Beck — it’s just what “people are telling me.” Obviously the plaintiff in a lawsuit can’t talk about it, and nobody at either Breitbart.com or Beck’s operation has said a word about it. Then again, I haven’t gotten any angry e-mails denying it, so . . .

In order to understand why Breitbart.com might take especial umbrage at the idea of Dana Loesch leaving to join Glenn Beck’s rival New Media operation, it helps to listen to a podcast interview Andrew Breitbart recorded in December 2011 with Stephen K. Bannon.

Because Bannon is now executive chairman of Breitbart.com, this is a very important interview. Becca J. Lower and Danielle Saul have provided a full transcript, which I briefly excerpt here:

Breitbart: [T]here are a lot of Beck supporters. In the past, Beck has made a lot of mistakes and his supporters come out and try to defend him, because Beck is a coward and will not defend himself when he makes a mistake or lies about a person or steals content —
Bannon: Hold on, I want to go back over this: you’re saying that Glenn Beck’s a coward, Glenn Beck’s a liar, and you’re saying that Glenn Beck steals material from people?
Breitbart: Oh yes, and this is well-documented. And whenever he does it, he never answers to the charges. He’s a coward. He won’t have me on the radio show, he won’t have himself [and] me on GBTV, refused to have me on Fox when he threw me under the bus. During the Sherrod thing, I asked to be on TV or radio to explain why he had it wrong. Months later, we found out why he wouldn’t have me on is because he lied to his audience on television that he didn’t do the Sherrod story. . . . In order to rectify the situation, he went on TV and tried to pretend like he was above the fray and told O’Reilly, to his face, a lie . . .
He also has historically been found to take countless bloggers’ content, to turn it into book gold, to turn it into chalkboard gold . . .He will not answer to the charges, and his minions online like to defend him. . . .

You can — and certainly should — read the whole thing.

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Category: Andrew Breitbart, Dana Loesch, Glenn Beck, Journalism

Comments

60 Responses to “Credit Where Credit Is Due: Breitbart, Beck and the Dana Loesch Lawsuit”

  1. Mike Stack
    December 30th, 2012 @ 7:11 am

    Anybody who doesn’t agree with pro-Breitbart or pro Mandy Nagy gets “GTFO” comment? I have plenty of links. Would you have printed the truth? The only time I’ve seen you, as a mod, comment like this is when Rauhauser and co were trolling this site.

  2. elaine
    December 30th, 2012 @ 8:36 am

    It’s helpful to refer to facts rather than make baseless assertions…

    Breitbart broke the Sherrod story at 11:18 AM (Eastern Time) on July 19, 2010. This was during Glenn Beck’s third hour on his radio show.

    You can listen to the MP3 of the program here:

    http://www.glennbeck.com/content/show/2010-07-19/

    I’ve listened to the third hour of that July 19th program this morning. There’s no mention of the Sherrod story on radio on the day the story broke. As I said before, he also didn’t mention it on his TV show at 5 PM.

    According to this timeline, Glenn Beck didn’t mention the Shirley Sherrod story until the next day on his radio show:

    http://keywiki.org/index.php/Sherrod_Videos_and_Timeline

    Here’s the thing: Breitbart got caught in a trap the left set for him on the Sherrod story. He could have (and should have) waited for the raw video to see what the context of the story was before taking it public, but he didn’t. Breitbart was upset that he’d got caught in this trap, and instead of owning up to it, he started pointing fingers at others who’d allegedly also run with the story without all the facts. Unfortunately, he lied about who else covered the story…
    Kinda makes it sound like he’s the coward who can’t admit his mistakes, rather than Glenn Beck…

  3. Jaynie59
    December 30th, 2012 @ 10:01 am

    You’ll forgive me if I don’t take Beck or Wiki as “proof” of anything. Beck is a known liar and his organization is full of scam artists (Dana should feel right at home) and anybody can edit Wiki. Andrew Breibart posted the entire clip of Sherrod which included her change of heart when she decided to help the white farmer. Andrew specifically wrote about it in his original post, the point of which was to expose the hypocrisy of the NAACP calling the Tea Party racists while the audience at an NAACP event cheered the deliberate discrimination of a white man at the hands of a black woman who had the power of the federal government over him. That video was a disgusting example of liberal racists cheering each other on.
    As far as the full video of Sherrods speech is concerned, it proved she is a racist. She tells a harrowing and heartfelt story of the death of her father that made me want to cry for her. Understanding why she is a racist doesn’t change the fact that she is a racist.

  4. CowboyLogic
    December 30th, 2012 @ 10:43 am

    Interesting article.

  5. Wombat_socho
    December 30th, 2012 @ 11:15 am

    Mike, I know you’re capable of reading and understanding plain English, so what exactly is your problem here? Not that I need to explain myself to you, but this guy gave every indication of being a drive-by troll. On the off-chance that he wasn’t, I offered him the option to provide some links to back up his BS instead of just being summarily whacked with the banhammer.

    Now, if you have such links, and want to do a blog post about it, and link that post here, I’m totally okay with that, and don’t think Stacy or Smitty would have a problem either.

  6. CryingWolfeBlog
    December 30th, 2012 @ 5:18 pm

    That “guy” is a friend of mine, who has helped produce 90% of what is on my blog and the majority of the news that I and a FEW others share with Stacy about Rauhauser and others. I never see complaints when info is written about Neal that some provide.

    I have no problem,per se, but the simple means to the ends will be that I will publish what I have on my blog and put let facts back them up.

    Thanks for giving me the chance to respond.

  7. CryingWolfeBlog
    December 30th, 2012 @ 5:20 pm

    We’ll start with the REAL story of Andrew, Mandy and the 9/11 Project….

  8. K-Bob
    December 30th, 2012 @ 6:58 pm

    My “assertion” was simply me telling you what Breibart said, which you clearly missed.

    Here’s the thing: Beck had a chance to get on board with Restoration when he started out interviewing Gov. Palin. But he decided to join the chorus of jellyfish and instead came out with a declaration that she wasn’t “serious.” He then decided to label Newt a Progressive and implied—quite heavily— that Newt was a racist as well. Astoundingly, he then appeared to give some support to Jon “I’m with Obama” Huntsman.

    Breitbart stayed totally focused on defeating Obama, and took the heat for it every day.

    I wish Beck would manage to keep a similar focus. He really did yeoman work helping to crystallize the vital necessity for Restoration. Then came his bizarre turn away from it all.

    If you want to focus on “mistakes,” there’s plenty there to choose from.

  9. Wombat_socho
    December 31st, 2012 @ 10:46 am

    Unlike my boss, I don’t know everybody in conservatism, so I had no way of knowing that – and frankly, it would have made no difference if I had. I operate on the posts in front of me. Also, you’re welcome.

  10. obfuscate2
    January 1st, 2013 @ 3:36 pm

    Why does it matter who offered Loesch a job? The dispute is between Loesch and Breitbart.com over her employment contract. Whether it is TheBlaze.com or HuffingtonPost, it is not the responsibility of the offering party to even know the contract terms of the person they want to hire.

    Why drag Beck into this at all?