September 10, 2009

Beck Watch: Who’s Still Advertising?

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Glenn Beck earned another scalp today as the President’s communications director for the National Endowment of the Arts, Yossi Sergant, was asked to resign for urging politically inclined artists to support the Obama administration’s agenda. This comes after Obama’s green jobs czar Van Jones was forced to resign after Beck repeatedly (and successfully) portrayed him as a liberal ideologue.

For the past few weeks, Color of Change has been urging advertisers to withdraw their support from Beck’s program after his racially charged remarks about Barack Obama. They boasted this week that 62 major advertisers have already joined the boycott. And Media Matters recently got on the case, tracking which advertisers have stayed loyal to the widely popular Glenn Beck program. Here’s today’s list:

  • Lear Capital
  • Legacy Publishing Company (The Total Transformation Program)
  • The Foundation for a Better Life
  • News Corp. (The Wall Street Journal)
  • Carbonite
  • LifeLock
  • Mortgage relief hotline 1-888-336-5967
  • Ashley Furniture (Which previously stated it had “pulled” its advertising from Beck)
  • Rosland Capital
  • National Review
  • Conservatives for Patient’s Rights
  • Merit Financial
  • Superior Gold Group
  • Loan modification helpline 800-917-8549
  • IRSTaxAgreements.com
  • Clarity Media Group (The Weekly Standard)
  • Roche Diagnostics (Accu-Chek Aviva)
  • Zero Technologies (ZeroWater)

For a program that used to include ads of AT&T, UPS and Bank of America, it’s clear that Beck’s advertising has taken a serious hit. But as he continues to earn scalps, it appears that his persuasive potency hasn’t yet felt the same strain.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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