98 Advertisers Pull Ads from Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Politicususa  By: Jason Easley

The toxic environment that right wing talk radio has created is now destroying it as Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who don’t want their ads to appear on Hannity, Beck, or Limbaugh.

Taylor on Radio-Info had this note that Premiere Networks is circulating:

To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory. More than 350 different advertisers sponsor the programs and services provided to your station on a barter basis. Like advertisers that purchase commercials on your radio station from your sales staff, our sponsors communicate specific rotations, daypart preferences and advertising environments they prefer. . .They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.

 

MORE HERE

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Michael Steele: GOP Will Not Take Over House In 2010

NRCC Pushes Back Against Steele Over 2010 Pessimism, GOP Operatives Furious

First Posted: 01- 5-10 10:26 AM   |   Updated: 01- 5-10 10:42 AM

Republican operatives are privately furious with RNC Chairman Michael Steele for predicting on Monday night that the GOP will not take over the House of Representatives in 2010.

One strategist called the comment “stupid,” arguing that it will put the party in a bind when it comes to candidate recruitment and generally lower expectations and excitement over the 2010 elections. Others, who refused to go on the record, lamented the inevitable follow-up questions that would be asked to Republicans, such as: do you agree with the sentiments of the RNC Chairman?

And, sure enough, on Tuesday, the National Congressional Campaign Committee released a statement in which it basically slapped down Steele for his electoral prognostication.

“The NRCC’s goal — as the campaign arm of the House Republican Conference — has always been to recapture the majority in 2010,” said Ken Spain, press secretary for the committee. “Independent political analysts and even liberal columnists have stated that Republicans have a very real shot at taking back the majority in 2010. Make no mistake about it, we are playing to win.”

It is extremely rare to see two campaign committees on such different pages when it comes to messaging. Steele was able to survive a rocky start to his tenure at the RNC. But the grumbling never fully died down — and his remarks on Sean Hannity’s radio show Monday night have only exacerbated the situation.

“I can’t give a number [of seats the GOP will win] yet, because like I said, we’re just now beginning to look at the races,” Steele said. Asked if Republicans will take back the House, he confessed: “Not this year.”

“I don’t know all the candidates yet,” Steele added. “We still have some vacancies that need to get filled, but then the question we need to ask ourselves is: ‘If we do that, are we ready?’”

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Olbermann Increases Pressure on Hannity For His Waterboard Offer

FILE - In this Feb. 23, 2009 file photo, MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann attends the "Defying Inequality" Broadway concert, a celebrity benefit for equal rights, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)

Hannity Waterboard Offer: Olbermann Increases The Pressure

DAVID BAUDER | April 28, 2009 09:03 PM EST |

NEW YORK — The debate over torture is getting personal for two of cable TV’s prime-time hosts. After Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity made a seemingly impromptu offer last week to undergo waterboarding as a benefit for charity, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann leapt at it. He offered $1,000 to the families of U.S. troops for every second Hannity withstood the technique.

Olbermann repeated the offer on Monday’s show and said in an interview Tuesday that he’s heard no response. He said he’ll continue to pursue it.

“I don’t think he has the courage to even respond to this _ let alone do it,” Olbermann said.

Fox News Channel representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The two men are on opposite poles of a debate that has preoccupied the worlds of talk TV and radio. Hannity says waterboarding is a fair and necessary interrogation technique for suspected terrorists; Olbermann calls it torture, says it’s ineffective and should not be done by Americans.

Charles Grodin was challenging Hannity on the issue on Fox last week, and asked whether he would consent to be waterboarded.

“Sure,” Hannity said. “I’ll do it for charity … I’ll do it for the troops’ families.”

It wasn’t exactly clear how serious the conversation was, since Grodin joked, “Are you busy on Sunday?” and Hannity laughed.

“I’ll let you do it,” Hannity said.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Grodin said. “I’ll hand you a towel when you come out of the shower.”

Olbermann’s offer was quick. Besides the $1,000 per second, Olbermann said he’d double it if Hannity acknowledges he feared for his life and admits that waterboarding is torture.

“The idea of putting somebody in a position they have volunteered for, for charity, to respond to their own unsupportable claims, is in many ways priceless,” Olbermann said.

MORE HERE

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Richard Poplawski: Influenced By Fox News Host Glenn Beck And Right-Wing Radio??

Did Paranoid Right-Wing Media Fuel the Pittsburgh Cop Killer’s Rage?

By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted April 8, 2009.

Richard Poplawski, the man who allegedly murdered three Pittsburgh cops, was clearly influenced by Fox News’s Glenn Beck and right-wing radio.

On April 6, two days after the 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly murdered three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a radio host named Alex Jones settled in before a microphone in his studio in Austin, Texas to do some damage control. “The mainstream media has certainly enjoyed tying me into this story,” Jones complained. “They’re attacking me and saying I’m delusional and there’s no New World Order The Second Amendment, what the country’s founded on–it’s all my fault!”

Poplawski was a neo-Nazi wannabe who railed against blacks, Jews, “Zionists,” and gun control. And like many members of the far-right fringe, he allegedly visited Jones’ Web sites and posted alarming reports by Jones’ writers on the white supremacist message board, Stormfront. (Poplawski’s posts are here, authored under the handle, “Braced For Fate.”) While Alex Jones generally avoids overt racism, he has found an eager audience on Stormfront by conjuring dark visions of an impending New World Order, claiming FEMA is secretly building a national concentration camp network, and announcing that President Barack Obama has planned mass gun seizures on his way to establishing a leftist dictatorship. “Remember, the first step in establishing a dictatorship is to disarm the citizens,” warned a March 13 commentary on Jones’ website, Prison Planet.

In the wake of Poplawski’s alleged murder spree, the killer’s friends and family members painted a portrait of a paranoid young man whose worldview was informed almost totally by the kind of conspiratorial themes entertained by Jones. Poplawski’s best friend, Edward Perkovic, who also spouted white supremacist rhetoric, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that his friend “grew angry recently over fears Obama would outlaw guns.” Poplawski’s mother remarked to police investigators that her son targeted cops “because he believed that as a result of economic collapse, the police were no longer able to protect society.”

MORE HERE

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Send It All Back

When I watched the video of Sean Hannity’s Tuesday night show, I was half expecting him to leap out of his chair, grab his producer by the lapels and scream something about a goblin on the wing of the airplane — all puffy and bloodshot, hair mussed, tie undone, spittle and sweat flying all around.

There was Sean Hannity on television: breathlessly announcing the red dawn of “socialism you can believe in.” “The New America.” He called the recovery bill, “a liberal hijacking of the American way of life.” Uh-huh. Hijacking. Terrorists rather than goblins on the wing. I get it. And even though we just wrapped up eight years of the largest government expansion in our country’s history, Hannity derided the recovery bill as “the largest government expansion in our country’s history.”

But, unbelievably, that wasn’t the most ludicrous part of the show. The frantic announcement was preceded by a newsreel-style montage featuring video of the various congressional floor debates about the bill, footage of Boehner throwing down the bill and, naturally, President Obama signing the bill. All backed with the frighteningly pulse-pounding choir chants of the apocalyptic anthem “O Fortuna.”

There’s no gray area in what he was suggesting. Socialism is here, said Hannity, and it’s really scary. The choir music said so.

Hannity is once again joined in this crusade by very serious pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy, Alex Castellanos, Joe Scarborough, Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck who, at one point, claimed that President Obama is both a socialist and a fascist — a feat that calls to mind an old George Carlin joke about how it’s physically impossible to “put your seat-back forward.”

The message is clear. The voices on the far-right are unanimous.

Therefore, I’m calling upon Sean Hannity to use his prime time television program as a platform to rally Republican politicians, cable news hacks and citizens alike to refuse delivery of not just recovery bill spending, but all so-called “socialist” government programs. Send it all back. End American socialism now! All of it.

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Oh! No! The Democrats might restore the Fairness Doctrine

by Geezer Power

The rats who now control over 90% of the main stream media are freaking out at the idea of returning to the Fairness Doctrine , which has been held in check for years by Vetoes from both Ronnie Raygun and Poppa Bu$h. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was (in the Commission’s view) honest, equitable, and balanced. Faux News, who’s motto is, “cough cough* fair and balanced’ has a few things to say about this outrageous possibility.

And needless to menton, so does Clear Channel who owns over 1,100 full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, twelve radio channels on XM Satellite Radio, and more than 30 television stations in the United States. Premiere Radio Networks, which is the largest syndication company in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clear Channel and is home to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others. Sean Hannity recently signed a large multi-market contract with Clear Channel, as well.

In early 2004, Air America Radio Network was launched and was then the only all-progressive talk radio network. A predecessor, the UAW’s I.E. America Radio Network, which was home to hosts such as Thom Hartmann, Peter Werbe, and Mike Malloy, never gained national attention. Its last day on the air was February 27, 2004, only weeks before Air America took to the airwaves. Al Franken’s show was the centerpiece of the network, and would remain so for a little less than 3 years. The show featured Franken’s low key humor, political commentary, and guest and audience participation. AAR became the fastest growing network in modern radio history as Sinton was able to assemble a national network of 100 stations, including 18 of the top twenty markets, in just six months.

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Lincoln = Republican = Just Like Me, Sean Hannity = Awesome!

Sean Hannity christened the new Colmes-less show with a predictably ridiculous segment in which he claimed that President-elect Obama has been engaged in an on-going attempt to hijack Abraham Lincoln’s legacy from — seriously — the modern Republican Party.

HANNITY: And in Your America tonight, Barack Obama is doing everything he can to convince Americans that he is the rightful inheritor of Abraham Lincoln’s legacy. [...] First, at the top, I just remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

The red flag here? He “just remembers” the part about Lincoln’s party affiliation. This indicates that everything else about Lincoln is therefore processed through the doofwerks of Hannity’s America, inside which reality and universally accepted facts are mercilessly sculpted, oversimplified and kneejerked into bloody submission, and thus ejecting through the ass-end an easy-to-digest-but-insanely-wrong deductive equation: Lincoln = Republican = Just Like Me, Sean Hannity = Awesome!

Lincoln was indeed the first Republican president. Good job, Hannity! Erudite! More about the history of party affiliation presently, but to somehow suggest that President-elect Obama is trying to steal Lincoln all for himself, or for Hannity to imply that Bush Republicanism is the same as Lincoln Republicanism is about as realistic as suggesting that Lincoln survived the assassination as is currently alive and lurching around — top hat and all — through the forests of the upper Midwest like a lanky, undead sasquatch. Then again, Hannity once dedicated an entire segment of his show to the existence of demons walking among us. I’m not suggesting Hannity believes that Lincoln is still alive, but it wouldn’t be shocker given his belief in goblins and the like.

Regardless, he’s clearly unable to fathom why this particular moment in American history calls to mind the spirit and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. This is nothing short of miraculous given the ubiquity of all things Kearns-Goodwin-y. Incidentally, the “Mortal Kombat vs. The Team of Rivals” video game tie-in is pretty sweet. The Seward “Pantaloons of Chaos” move (X, X, Up, Down, B, B, Y) is totally indefensible — especially against that punk Liu Kang.

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