Glenn Beck Has No Time for Gold Controversy

As has been mentioned here before, leftwing critics have attempted to make up a controversy over the relationship between Beck and his advertisers. They claim that it is somehow wrong for Beck to promote gold and then have Goldline and other companies promote his show because he invests in gold and has had a long time relationship. Politico reports Beck’s take.

Glenn Beck has no apologies for promoting gold – and no time for the criticism he’s gotten for it.

Liberal media watchdogs, commentators and satirists have had a field day with the increasingly overt – and profitable – synergy between gold retailers and their endorsers in the conservative media, including Beck, Bill O’Reilly and fellow Fox News personalities Brian Kilmeade and Andrew Napolitano, among others. And Fox says it has taken steps that will ensure that its policy of prohibiting product endorsements from anyone on-air is followed.

But Beck recently took to his website to mock critics who questioned whether it was proper for him to tout gold investments as a hedge against an economic collapse he often predicts on the air, while a handful of gold coin retailers pay to advertise on his shows on Fox News and AM radio.

“I have a statement to make about the recent allegations by the liberal blogs that – quote – Glenn Beck promotes gold to audience, while profiting from gold investment firms,” Beck said in 4-minute clip posted on his website Friday evening.

“Yes. Yes, it’s true,” he said, pretending to choke up and explaining that “like Tiger Woods, I’m not a perfect person, starting with my chins. I’ve got – I don’t know – seven of them. My hairline is thinning. I’m a little overweight.”

Scrunching his face into a mask of mock puzzlement, he said “the accusations that I actually purchase one of the products I endorse may be shocking to some.” He said he’s turned down or terminated endorsement deals “because I didn’t believe in them” and proclaimed, tongue-firmly-planted-in-check that he’d been trying to keep his arrangement with Goldline a “secret.”

“But I guess it was only a matter of time before people started to catch on, what with the daily advertisements and my firm belief that the dollar is in rough shape and people should protect themselves, and me being on the Internet and the radio and television all the time saying this.”

Beck facetiously said he “didn’t know that by me suggesting to you to buy gold through a fine establishment like Goldline.com – 866-Goldline – that the global price of this trillion-dollar industry – global industry – would actually start to wildly fluctuate, because of me.”

On Thursday, the network also indicated it would ask Rosland Capital, another gold retailer, to remove from its website the logo for Bill O’Reilly’s Fox show, the O’Reilly Factor, which Rosland features along with an audio clip of O’Reilly urging listeners to buy gold because “The U.S. Dollar is under attack!”

Fox’s concern was that O’Reilly’s endorsement of Rosland was specific to the radio show he no longer does, and Rosland is not a sponsor of his television show.

Rosland spokesman Steve Getzug said the company had not heard from Fox but was already “in the process of pulling the reference down as part of an overall update of Rosland’s website.” He called the O’Reilly endorsement “dated” and said “it’s been a while since the company has updated its website.”

Beck’s critics have not suggested that he was actually influencing the price of gold, which had been rising steadily until this month, by encouraging his fans to buy coins from Goldline.

But some financial analysts and precious metals experts did tell POLITICO that potential gold investors would be wise to look into bullion or exchange traded funds intended to track the price of gold, rather than the coins sold by Goldline and a handful of other firms that advertise on Beck’s shows and those of other conservative talkers. That’s because those firms focus on collectible or antique coins, which they sell for many times the value of the intrinsic gold and promote as being exempt from a potential government seizure of gold like that which occurred under Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Beck has suggested that gold coins are a good buy now because President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are steering the economy towards disaster.

And that feedback loop – Beck stoking fear of economic collapse, hyping gold as a hedge against collapse, and endorsing a company selling gold – prompted liberals from the watchdog group Media Matters to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann to Comedy Central’s faux-news hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to allege a glaring conflict of interest.

“Glenn Beck is paid by Goldline to drum up interest in gold, which increases in value during times of fear, an emotion reinforced nightly on Fox by Glenn Beck,” Stewart said on The Daily Show last week.

Fox policy barring hosts from serving as paid spokespeople is industry standard, said Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin because it guards networks’ credibility against “the taint of self interest.” But he said, no matter what Goldline calls Beck, “the situation clearly crosses the line. If Beck is not serving as a paid spokesperson, then he must be the tooth fairy.”

There’s a larger issue in play, as well, according to Nancy Marsden of FITMedia, a non-profit group pushing the FCC to amend its regulations to set a higher standard for disclosure of paid endorsements on broadcast and cable television.

“Beck is a poster child for the proposed amendments,” she blogged on Huffington Post.

Beck’s representatives declined to comment for this story, but Albarian, the Goldline president, said that disclosure of the company’s financial relationship with Beck’s productions eliminates any potential conflicts.