your moment of glenn

Where do you take a conversation when the only condition is that both parties disagree on everything and neither is open to persuasion? Most cable news conversations go something like this, with both sides just shout unintelligibly at each other until the commercial break. Glenn Beck and Al Sharpton decided to restrict the conversation to things they agree on: Martin Luther King, Jr. was good for America, people tend to have beliefs, and freedom of speech is a fundamental right.

Poll/Video

Video shot at last weekend’s 9/12 Project protests has surfaced showing Heidi Noonan, an associate producer for Fox News, encouraging the crowd to hoot and holler behind Griff Jenkins while he talks live from the scene with Glenn Beck in the studio. Fox is calling this a rookie mistake by an inexperienced producer. But is it also an ethics violation?

Fox News host Glenn Beck has a unique interpretation of American populism and the Founding Fathers. But he also has his own ideological forefather who has gone largely unnoticed by a large portion of the media watchdogs who have tracked Beck’s meteoric rise. That is, until the incisive Salon exposé of W. Cleon Skousen, which ran yesterday online. Inside, we run down some of the article’s most revealing, juicy bits.