re: #19 Charles

I agree. They soft-pedaled it quite a bit. For some reason the MSM is very reluctant to dig into the far right connections here.

I suspect there is a seismic shift underway in the media industrial complex. For years, I have cited Thomas Frank’s landmark cultural history, The Conquest of Cool, Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, as the “Rosetta Stone of media bias.”
Link
Two of Frank’s contentions were especially important: That the 60s counterculture as most people know it was very largely a creation of the advertising industry and that this counterculture dominates the internal culture of the media-entertainment-advertising industry right up the present.

Today, it appears the media culture is prepared to shift away from this moth-eaten paradigm and toward the embrace of a new media-generated counterculture, that of the Paulians, conspirakooks, and (once they correct their stylistic defects) the tea-partiers. In either case, the underlying motivation (“delusion of distinction” and the trappings of rebellion as advertising tropes) will remain the same.

In this context, Beck’s loss of advertisers is purely a temporary setback and may pay big dividends in the future. New advertisers will move in to exploit this niche and they will be able to portray themselves as “edgy” “committed” and “daring” for doing so.