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An online campaign against Fox News editorialist Glenn Beck is working.

Web site ColorofChange.org, reacting to a long line of racial comments about President Barack Obama, has managed thus far to knock loose from Beck's fold Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble, Progressive, S.C. Johnson, GEICO, Men's Wearhouse and, just Wednesday morning, Sargento.

**UPDATE: On Thursday, ConAgra, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis and RadioShack all backed out of sponsoring Glenn Beck's programs, according to a media advisory.

"We applaud GEICO and all of the other companies who have stepped forward to pull their ads from Glenn Beck," said James Rucker, executive director of Color of Change, in a Tuesday media advisoryrelease. "Beck’s rhetoric is dangerous to the fabric of our democracy, and we are heartened that so many big companies feel the same way. We won’t stop here — we’re going to continue our fight to see that as many of Beck’s advertisers pull their support as possible."

And video clips like this may have something to do with it ...

Watchdog group Media Matters, which has emphatically joined in the crusade to knock Beck from cable television, notes that many of the advertisers who refused in 2006 to support progressive-tilted Air America radio are still backing Beck.

According to the group, those companies are: General Electric, Farmers Insurance, Office Depot, Nestlé (Gerber), Red Lobster, State Farm, Travelocity, the U.S. Postal Service, Walmart and Wyeth.

Media Matters includes of controversial, provocative (some would say shocking) segments on Beck's television program that, for the sake of brevity, is excerpted below:

Beck talks about "put[ting] poison" in Speaker Pelosi's wine. On his Fox News show, Beck gave a glass of wine to a person wearing a Pelosi mask, encouraged her to drink it, and then said: "By the way, I put poison in your -- no, I -- I look forward to all the policy discussions that we're supposed to have." [Glenn Beck, 8/6/09]

Beck: Obama is a "racist" and "has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture." Beck said: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy -- over and over and over again -- who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture -- I don't know what it is. But you can't sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff and not have it wash over." He later added, "I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. He has a -- this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the way -- look at the things he has been surrounded by." [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 7/28/09]

Beck: "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill" is "driven by President Obama's thinking on ... reparations" and his desire to "settle old racial scores." According to Beck, "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America. And they are all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea: reparations." Beck later added that Obama's "goal is creating a new America, a new model, a model that will settle old racial scores through new social justice." [Glenn Beck, 7/23/09]

ColorofChange.org has created a simple form for media activists: just enter your name and off an objection goes, directly to Beck's remaining advertisers.

Whether the campaign will be successful remains to be seen. And while the conservative Fox News channel still appears resolute in keeping Beck, at this point there's bound to be some discussion of how to stem the tide of advertisers pulling their support.

-- Stephen C. Webster

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized, business, entertainment, media, nation, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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By Kenneth Hein

NEW YORK (Nielsen Business Media) - Some of the nation's biggest advertisers are distancing themselves from Fox News host Glenn Beck after he called President Obama a racist during a July 28 broadcast.

Geico has pulled its ads from Fox News Channel's "The Glenn Beck Program." Lawyers.com, which is owned by LexisNexis, also has vowed not to advertise during the program, according to Color of Change, an African-American online political organization that has been urging advertisers to stop supporting the show.

Additionally, Procter & Gamble, Progressive Insurance and SC Johnson all said their ad placements during the broadcast were made in error and that they would correct the mistake.

The controversy stems from Beck's comment that President Obama is a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people."

Geico spent more than a half-billion dollars on ads last year, according to the Nielsen Co. It spent more than a quarter-billion dollars in the first half of 2009.

A Fox representative noted that Geico is dropping its ads from the show but was quick to note that it was shifting dollars to other programs. "The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network, so there has been no revenue lost," the rep said.

Beck's show pulled in an average of slightly more than 2 million viewers for each of its 19 telecasts in July, according to Nielsen.

Progressive Insurance representative Cristy Cote said that there has been a lot of confusion surrounding the company's involvement with the program. "We had not bought advertising on the show in the first place," she said, "so when we learned that our advertising had appeared on the show by mistake, we contacted the network to correct the error."

She said Progressive tries to "avoid programing that we believe our customers and potential customers might find extremely offensive."

A Procter & Gamble representative echoed that sentiment: "At times our ads are run by mistake on shows that they were not meant to ... Any of our ads that ran did so by mistake, and we'll try to make sure that doesn't happen in the future."

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)

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