Topic: Accuracy in Media
Cliff Kincaid loves his dubious right-wing fringe figures (Scott Lively, Jared Taylor, Joel Gilbert), so it's not a surprise that he would rush to the defense of another one, Glenn Beck.
Kincaid's May 8 Accuracy in Media column is dedicated to echoing Beck's very narrow defense that he really wasn't depicting New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg as a Nazi during his NRA speech, he was trying to depict Bloomberg as a communist, and that there is a huge difference between the two. Kincaid insists that any claim that Beck was invoking Nazi imagery is "demonstrably false" and huffed that one writer who did make that claim would not "retract his charge after he was informed by Accuracy in Media that his account was flatly inaccurate."
But Kincaid conveniently overlooks the fact that while Beck did apparently model the image on what Kincaid insisted is a "very famous" pose by Vladimir Lenin, it's Naziism, not communism, that's infamous for the raised-arm salute, and it's not a shock that that people not steeped in Soviet propaganda -- that is, the vast majority of America -- would see Beck's image as echoing Nazis, not communists.
Nevertheless, after quoting a writer who pointed that out, Kincaid insisted that the image "is clearly not the same thing as the Nazi salute given by Hitler."
Kincaid was also offended that Jewish groups were calling on Beck to apologize, and that Media Matters (disclosure: my employer) "clearly hoped to resurrect the controversy over Beck, when he was with Fox News, having identified George Soros as having been a Nazi collaborator in his youth." But Kincaid didn't mention that Beck's attack on Soros is, to coin a phrase, demonstrably false.
