When I flip through the channel guide on my tv, the infomercials are labeled as such. How is this different from infomercials?
But Beck has recently come under fire from liberals alleging a conflict of interest. The criticism spiked after he used one of his trademark blackboard illustrations to provide tips for weathering “the three scenarios that we could be facing: recession, depression or collapse.” In the case of a total collapse of the economic system, he recommended that his viewers construct “fruit cellars” and rely on what he called “the three G system. It’s God, gold and guns.”
[…..]Peter Epstein, president of Merit Financial Services, which advertises on Beck’s show, says gold retailers expect favorable coverage from commentators on whose shows they pay to advertise. “You pay anybody on any network and they say what you pay them to say,” said Epstein. “They’re bought and sold.”
funluvn
Damned shame that Viagara and Work from Home schemes don’t start with a “G”, or Beck could have fit in a couple more of his big advertisers as well.
Xanthippas
Hell of a question. The guys on my favorite local sports radio station are routinely reading spots for advertisers, and talking about the goodies they get from advertisers. But they’re so flip about it, and so frequently undermine the live spots with their own bits, that you can’t possibly fail to realize that they’re just saying stuff because they’re paid to do so. So, it’s nice to know that local sports radio hosts have more journalistic ethics than right-wing cable and radio pundits.
DougJ
The guys on my favorite local sports radio station are routinely reading spots for advertisers, and talking about the goodies they get from advertisers. But they’re so flip about it, and so frequently undermine the live spots with their own bits, that you can’t possibly fail to realize that they’re just saying stuff because they’re paid to do so.
Exactly, when I read radio guys read spots they adopt a totally different tone of voice.
funluvn
@Xanthippas: Right wing cable and radio pundits don’t much care for ethics. Or is that ethnics? Or both?
Folderol and Ephemera
I certainly don’t want (and don’t think) that civilization will crash and burn, but, if it does, I just hope that all of Beck’s followers listen astutely to his advice.
Because if civilization does go bad, “god, gold, and guns” will be of little help. God won’t help, you can’t eat gold, and guns are just clumsy clubs.
Water filtration, hydroponics, and ammunition. Duh.
(Note: Also essential for zombie invasions)
rob!
Beck says so much crazy shit per hour that its hard to even notice the conflict of interest via the gold stuff. Maybe that’s part of the plan.
SiubhanDuinne
IOKIYAGB
woody
Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Fats Eddie Schultz, in fact all the so-called lions of Leftie radio routinely shill for gold dealers and “health products” scams apparently live, on their programs… This seems to me to diminish their cred…
Sly
There aren’t any regulations against Glenn Beck making a really shitty stand-up routine or really shitty movie that no one goes to see, so I doubt there’s any regulation against him selling self-promotional nonsense to the timid and feeble-minded in any other venue.
And I don’t really want one. There are some cases where fools and their money should be easily parted. Plus it makes for great comedy of the “laughing at you, not laughing with you” variety.
DougJ
Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Fats Eddie Schultz, in fact all the so-called lions of Leftie radio routinely shill for gold dealers and “health products” scams apparently live, on their programs… This seems to me to diminish their cred…
I don’t care about regular paid shilling, whether it’s those guys or Rush Limbaugh. But what Beck is doing here is different since he’s not presenting it as an advertisement.
RareSanity
@Xanthippas:
Exactly. I was thinking the exact same thing.
Talk about the wingnut event horizon…
“Conservative” talk radio is the only media where it is not self evident if the principle actually believes what they are saying.
Sly
@DougJ
In all honesty, if you’re looking for scam artists presenting themselves as honest merchants of useful information, Glenn Beck is way down on that list. There are bestselling snake oil salesman out there that even super glibertarians go after.
Beck’s just following the venerable tradition of taking the sale of nonsense to desperate people to the political arena.
DougJ
There are bestselling snake oil salesman out there that even super glibertarians go after.
Yes, but his shows are labeled as infomercials.
valdivia
Have you guys been following the Blackwater founder story? Vanity Fair has an incredible interview. Turns out he was a CIA asset. Hmm.
Ailuridae
Beck is very clearly providing unlicensed investment advice. And bad advice at that.
jeffreyw
Way OT, but this story has it all, or at least most of it.
David
Gun sellers boosted sales scaring Wingnuts. Now it’s the gold sellers’ turn.
Sly
Labeling is pretty tricky. Setting up an infomercial as a news program or a panel discussion of professionals and then putting, in small print “The statements made on this program should not be taken as actual claims of efficacy” is not really labeling, is it? That’s all the FTC requires. Plus, people like Trudeau make most of their ill-gotten gains off books, which has a lower standard than actually selling Pulverized Goat Penis as a cure for diverticulitis. They don’t even have to follow the fine-print guidelines in those cases.
The only difference I see between the two is that Beck’s opinions probably won’t kill you, it’ll just make you look really stupid if you start parroting them. There are popular hacks operating out there that are deluding the gravely ill for their own benefit, which can result in their customers becoming even more seriously ill or dying. It’s an important distinction, to be sure, but its one of degree and not one of kind.
PeakVT
Beck’s investment advice is even worse than Cramer’s.
DougJ
Beck is very clearly providing unlicensed investment advice. And bad advice at that.
Yes.
aimai
You’d think it would go the other way around: first gold sales and then gun sales to protect the gold. But I suppose its like the advertiser-driven movement to sell more books to Americans which began with a major advertising exec persuading new home builders to put built in bookshelves into every new living room.
BTW I ended up in a fairly hysterical argument with a libertarian who is still enraged that gold isn’t good regular currency over at a theological blog the other day.
So guns and gold go together like chocolate and peanut butter and it doesn’t really matter which one you buy first.
aimai
The Raven
So, expecting the FCC or FTC to enforce the law?
Croak!
AhabTRuler
@valdivia: Well, to be fair, the CIA is a criminal organization.
raholco
The Gold Scam Fear Merchants
October 23, 2009 · 42 Comments
As most legitimate advertisers flee the paranoid environs of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh’s daily program, gold sellers have leaped in to fill the void. Both Beck and Limbaugh give testimonials to their advertisers such as this.
Glenn Beck
“Before I started turning you on to Goldline, I wanted to look them in the eye. This is a top notch organization that’s been in business since 1960.”
Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime refinancings are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama’s reckless spending. But how do firms like Goldline make money? Well it’s all there in the fine print of their sales agreement.
OMG! An average stock broker commission is 2% and these scammers are getting 35% off the top. Where is the FTC and the CFTC in investigating this fraud? Why are Limbaugh and Beck propagating this scam?
raholco
Because the sheep must be fleeced:
The Gold Scam Fear Merchants
October 23, 2009 · 42 Comments
As most legitimate advertisers flee the paranoid environs of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh’s daily program, gold sellers have leaped in to fill the void. Both Beck and Limbaugh give testimonials to their advertisers such as this.
Glenn Beck
“Before I started turning you on to Goldline, I wanted to look them in the eye. This is a top notch organization that’s been in business since 1960.”
Obviously all these new boiler room high pressure sales groups that used to be pushing sub-prime refinancings are now trying to convince the unsophisticated listeners of right wing talk that they better buy gold before the dollar becomes worthless because of Obama’s reckless spending. But how do firms like Goldline make money? Well it’s all there in the fine print of their sales agreement.
OMG! An average stock broker commission is 2% and these scammers are getting 35% off the top. Where is the FTC and the CFTC in investigating this fraud? Why are Limbaugh and Beck propagating this scam?
El Cid
In the 1990s on the shortwave rightist / paranoid / militia radio shows, in addition to gold hawkers you also typically heard survivalist food & water purification tablets, and ‘nutraceuticals’ like colloidal silver which was supposed to kill everything bad in your system but actually serves to turn your skin permanently purplish-blue.
They’re back at the colloidal silver bullshit game, including lessons on how to home cook it. Yay!
Ailuridae
The comments on Talpin’s blog are pretty good. The odd thing is that most people seem to understand intuitively how a bubble forms because they’ve all had a friend or relative or soeone get caught up in an innocuos microbubble (baseball cards in the 80s, beanie babies in the 90s, if you’re really old Dutck tulips etc ) or a pernicious larger bubble like the current real estate market in SoCal, everywhere exurbia etc. Yet people want to believe that the latest phenomenon X whether it be gold or real estate or internet advertising stocks or what have you will go up forever.
SGEW
“Gold is not an investment; it is a hobby.”
– Trad. (orig. unknown)
Comrade Darkness
If they were real believers they’d rely solely on God. Pansies.
Comrade Darkness
@Ailuridae: What I can’t seem to get an answer on, despite posting in several places. Is what happens when everyone is using gold as currency? Okay, so imagine we have the Banana Republic collapse as the Reagan/Bush policies intended, dineros are worthless, here you are wanting to buy something, say, gasoline, and you are trying to use gold. But a hundred other Beck frothers are at the same station, trying to use gold. In any open market, that would make the value of gold plummet. So then where are you? You just spent your wad to fill up the car, now what are you going to do at the grocers?
Notorious P.A.T.
Glenn Beck: biggest scumbag in America today.
Woodrowfan
and how, exactly, do you get change from gold currency if all other money is worthless?? If all I have is $20 gold pieces I have to spend exactly $20??
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Beck is known to be a crazy, racist, insane, manipulative, lying, reactionary, jingoistic, sociopathic motherfucker who will say or do anything for ratings or to pump himself up, apparently up to and including callinf for taking up arms against his own country, every damned day ….. but let him give an advertiser some favorable comment without explicitly labeling it a commercial, and then we call the ethics police?
Oh ….. kay.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Folderol and Ephemera: This.
Perhaps the guns are so they can steal from the DFHs who stocked up non-perishable food. No way the wimpy flower children would have bought weapons. No sir.
Rathskeller
I worked for a startup that has become a (small) national brand. Our initial goal in the 2002-03 period was just to increase our name recognition, and so our PR strategy was shared in detail with every employee. I was very surprised to see how chameleon-like our radio spots were for the announcers. The scripts took on the personality of the syndicated radio announcers, using their catch phrases, sometimes taking a mild dig at our own product as if it were being ad-libbed. (Rush was the main announcer, I remember). We had the regular highly-produced radio spots with the music and the funny dialogue, but the scripts for announcers were specifically tailored.
I’m not in the ad biz, but that certainly seems like what has gone on here.
Douche Baggins
Gold as a currency and a defense against the Apocalypse has been part of paranoid right-wing culture for years. Apparently the IRS is illegal, the gold standard destroyed America, and the Lord appreciates his tithe in Kruggerands. You didn’t know that? My ‘nut boss told me so. Then he went off to Yahoo Finance to count his untold thousands.
Comrade Darkness
@Woodrowfan: Well, eventually, when all is settled, you can back up to pre 550 BC or so when coinage was invented (in what is now Turkey). People weighed the metal bits, or salt, or whatever you were trading of value and then gave you change in some agreed-upon weighed out other amount of value. Gold, though, is often the defacto base metal for weight even of other things, because everyone knows what it weighs.
This is why the money changers jesus tossed out of the temple were such a big deal. If you and your trading partner could not come up with agreed upon payment, you brought in a middle man to make the market. Horrifically inefficient. And coinage existed during jesus’ time but that doesn’t mean the average joe was using it. As you point out, the value was too high for most transactions. Oh, and coins often got cut into slivers, or even shaved down. That’s why to this day, most coins have some kind of an edge to them, to make that cheating detectable. The dime is probably the most clear example of this.
d0n camillo
Anybody who is dumb enough to take investment advice from Glenn Beck deserves to be fleeced. At least they won’t have any spare money to donate to the GOP once Glenn is done with them.
reid
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: I guess it’s like nailing Al Capone on tax evasion, you take what you can get.
Comrade Darkness
@d0n camillo: That’s my take too. Rah, rah, Palin, Beck, the gun dealers, yay, suck up that hard earned cash. 2010 is coming sooner than you think. This election won’t have the Abramoffs of the world funneling illegal donations to the republicans scott free.
maya
Beck’s endorsement explains this .
Suckahs!
Comrade Darkness
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: @reid: Exactly. Free speech is a broad area to work in. But FCC regulations are explicit on some points, and one of them is advertising. Come on, look at all the fall out over one frackin’ breast for three seconds during the super bowl.
Also the FTC §255.5 Disclosure of material connections. Beck would not qualify as an expert. Well, not in a sane world, he wouldn’t.
Hope
Paul Harvey used to do this as well – the unethical boob. And that’s the rest of that story
burnspbesq
@Ailuridae:
“Beck is very clearly providing unlicensed investment advice. And bad advice at that.”
Siccing the SEC on Beck sounds a lot like throwing Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, but I’ll take what I can get.
Starfish
Gold was down like 4% on Friday. Quick! Prop it up.
cleek
Drink Your Ovaltine!
Bgno64
Well, and then the question becomes – what if gold prices tumble? I’ve seen some speculation that gold itself is in a bubble right now; if the wingnuts are fully invested in gold and gold prices should fall, there’s your tipping point for riots in the streets, right there.
licensed to kill time
Gah, anyone who listens to Beck pretty much deserves to get fleeced. He’s a huckster, plain and simple. If you’re too dumb to see that, by all means put all your money into gold, take it down into the fruit cellar with your guns and your Bible and pray for the Rapture, and good luck with that. Just don’t ask for any government assistance when you emerge broke and hungry and unRaptured back into the Real World.
Comrade Darkness
@licensed to kill time: What? Turn down those massive farm subsidy checks? (the ones every member of the household is cashing, against the exact same farm, because we couldn’t even reform the system that much) Gosh, that wouldn’t be capitalistic!
cleek
@Bgno64:
they will blame Obama.
DougJ
@cleek
So simple, so true, so funny.
licensed to kill time
@Comrade Darkness:
Well, you know, there’s welfare for “Us” and then there’s welfare for “Them”. Two totally different things, doncha know. “Them” don’t deserve it, not like Us Real ‘muricans(R).
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
If money becomes as worthless as Beck predicts what will that make gold worth? If we really sink into some post-apocalyptic doomsday scenario does he really believe that people are going to give a shit about gold?
That being said, if the end times do come because of our socialist, muslim America-hating president makes us have access to affordable health care– certainly resulting in the downfall of America– then guns will have great value, so will stockpiles of food and the ability to provide heat and warmth. But gold? Nada.
Little Dreamer
I was just wondering about this recently myself. The Gold industry seems to have got themselves a Tee-Vee show!
xaaronx
This is offtopic, but a comment above reminded me.
Does anyone have a link to a good takedown of the “IRS is unconstitutional” idea? I had one on my old computer, but can’t remember the details of the craziness and was at a bit of a loss in a discussion with a glibertarian ex-roommate recently.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Folderol and Ephemera:
Zombies?! Really?! It is robots you should be worried about.
Sly
@xaaronx
The IRS itself has fought against claims of unconstitutionality to the extent that they have their own fact sheet on the subject. It’s not exhaustive, but it provides a good overview on what the claims are and why they’re not recognized by the courts.
Andy K
@xaaronx:
The only argument you need is, “You’re fucking insane.”
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@reid:
Good answer, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Andy K:
I think George Bush covered that one in 2005. He did such a good job of trying to desconstruct Social Security, he probably assured its survival for another 100 years.
“These government bonds that guarantee SS funds are just worthless pieces of paper” has to be one of the greatest gaffes by a government official ev-ah.
“President to all US Bond holders: Drop dead”
Priceless.
Martin
Yep, the housing bubble was all the fault of the CRA, but if you lose your shirt on the gold bubble, don’t blame Beck.
I’m guessing there’s about $600 in downside on gold right now. These people will only get more bitter, and it’ll all be Obama’s fault, natch.
Jonathan Holbert
@funluvn:
You have officially won this thread.
Wile E. Quixote
@Bgno64
Oh please, oh please, oh please. I’d love for someone to discover a huge source of gold, a new mine, a new way of extracting it from seawater, a huge golden asteroid being pulled to earth by Rush Limbaugh’s massive gravitational pull, anything and watch those fucking idiot goldbugs get their asses handed to them just like the Hunt brothers did when they tried to corner the silver market back in the late 1970s.
Woodrowfan
Comrade Darkness: thank you for your informative answer. Some of that i knew, other parts I’d forgotten. Since this is “Balloon Juice” I should note that it reminded me of Twoflower in “The Color of Magic.”