Van Jones, who is a reliable source, said that Glenn Beck refused to jump on the bandwagon of those calling for Shirley Sherrod to step down — Jones said Beck had doubts about the story told by the video tape Breitbart and Fox ran.
Is that true?
Jones talked about the flap caused when Andrew Breitbart and Fox News teamed up to spread the false story that Shirley Sherrod had acted in an illegally racist fashion:
In an interview with NPR’s Michele Norris, Jones said that, although his background is “much more colorful” than Sherrod’s, he can empathize with what it is like to be at the center of a media firestorm.
According to him, “we are in an age where people can absolutely engineer false stories and inject them into the media blood system in a way that we just don’t know how to deal with very well.”
Jones said that dirty tactics — selective editing, smear campaigns and a lack of reportorial due diligence — damage American society as a whole.
“One of the things that I think we’ve got to be clear about is that these kinds of attacks are not just attacks on individuals,” he said. “They’re attacks on the democratic system.”
Listen to the NPR interview — Jones credits Beck with doing the right thing near the end of the interview.
See! (If Jones is right about Beck) It just shows that there is hope for the temporal and secular salvation of all humans.
Good on Glenn Beck.
That’s one small step for a conservative, leading — we hope — to a giant leap for Glenn Beck, coming back from the Dark Side.
Update: Snatching a smear from the jaws of ethical behavior:
Beck couldn’t just do the right thing and leave it there — he worked to find ways to attack the reputation of Shirley Sherrod.
Damnation! If one of these Tea Party conservatives does something right, ethical and just, they get itchy, and have to go find a cat to throw, a dog to kick, and an old lady to push down in a mud puddle. They are just congenitally incapable of virtuous action. Van Jones caught Glenn Beck doing something right, so Beck, hating Jones, America’s future and the left so much, retracted it.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Beck is not just a random loon anymore. Salon.com, which does actual journalism, has this piece…
http://www.salon.com/news/glenn_beck/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/07/27/beck_s_angst_close_to_having_a_body_count
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Salt Lake City, really? Back when writing a column there, the easy part was finding the local angle. Whatever the item, it was always just a mere three or four degrees of separation away.
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Salt Lake City, or Phoenix? (No, I’ve not read his book.)
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Beck is a consumate liar. He is such an emotional wreck. It is obvious that he does and says things on his shows simply to attract attention and cause controversy. He also, however, is nuts. I know his background. He got his start by training with the original Morning Zoo DJ’s here in Tampa. He had been a daily marijuana user since age 15, then added alcohol and cocaine when he DJ’d in Salt Lake City (this is in his book). He was out of it every day for many years. I do not trust him in any way. Anything he says is suspect. He learned to shock his audiences at an early age. He cannot change, in my view.
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Glenn Beck is so used to telling lies, I believe he’d lie when the truth would serve him better. If he ever did say something with which I agreed, I’d have to check it out six ways to Sunday before I really believed he said it.
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