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Originally Posted by headquarters
Firstly - if anyone of you heard/ read Glenn Beck of Fox News - that guy really enraged me by saying that the youth camp was some weird phenomenon using words like hitlerjugend to describe it. He is by all counts a vulgar,opportunist propagandist agitator as far as I am concerned. All I can say about him is : base. Also some of the coverage in Fox News was disrespectful to say the least. Journalists misrepresented the situation and Norways political stance on global affairs to an extent that can only be seen as intentional or at best unprofessional. This unfair and unbalanced journalism needs to be pointed out to the good folk in the audience. All of you who live over there know what it means when the world press get their crazy talk on in a situation like this.
( Rant over).
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I feel like I need to apologize on Beck's behalf. He's a national embarrassment.
Glenn Beck is not a journalist- he's a political pundit and rabble rouser. He's basically a far right, conservative mouthpiece, and one of the more extreme and outspoken ones at that. He has a bad case of verbal diarhea. He's constantly in trouble for making inane, innacurate, and/or offensive statements (usually all of the above). It is fair to say that absolutely everything that comes out of his mouth will have been filtered through his narrow worldview in order to serve a specific political purpose. This makes most of what he says wildly inaccurate. He was trying to paint the "socialist" party summer camp targetted by the shooter in the most unflattering light possible. He obviously wants to demonize that particular political demographic by comparing its youth program to the Nazi youth organizations of Hitler's Germany. Unfortunately, a lot of his listeners don't know any better and he knows this. He's using the tragedy to score political points for the far right conservatives here in the U.S. He doesn't care at all about the dead kids, their families, or Norwegians in general. It makes me ill.
Unfortunately, this sort of "journalism" is becoming more and more common here in the U.S. There are entire radio and TV networks devoted to one or the other of the two major American political parties. You can be sure that anything that casts the other party in an unfavorable light will be harped on ad nauseum and anything embarrassing to the host's political leanings will be ignored, glossed over, spun, or excused. It's a shame. A lot of Americans are either too ignorant, too lazy, or too ill informed to come to their own political conclusions- they tend to rely on folks like Beck to tell them what to think and do. If Beck compares European socialist parties to Nazis, much of his audience will accept his assessment and run with it. It's really frightening. If Beck wants to make Nazi comparisons, he ought to look in the mirror first. If Goebbels were alive today, he and Glenn would probably be BFFs.