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Fox’s Glenn Beck fights ‘rape and murder’ website
Has a satirical website overstepped the mark in an attempt to lampoon the Fox TV host? His lawyers are on the case
The extremist Fox TV host Glenn Beck - the man who called Barack Obama a 'racist' and who campaigned successfully to drive the president's 'green jobs czar' Van Jones out of the White House - has taken offence at a satirical website called glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com.
In what looks like a first in cyber law, Beck's lawyers are arguing that the the very domain name itself is defamatory, never mind the content - which is currently unavailable because the site is down.
Beck's lawyers pounced within two days of the site appearing on September 1.
"Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?" asked the site. "We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 - in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?"
At the bottom of the page there was a small disclaimer making it clear that it was all a joke.
The anonymous owner of the site told ArsTechnica.com that he did it because it "just felt right". He decided to "flip" the recent Obama "birther" conspiracy - the spurious rumour that Obama was not actually born in the United States and therefore had no right to be president - and apply the same tactics to the increasingly controversial Fox News host. The website owner felt he was just "using Beck's tactics against him".
Legal experts are unsure how this might pan out. Speaking to ArsTechnica - which carries an excellent report on the origins and ramifications of the joke - public interest lawyer Paul Levy said that a domain name alone could indeed be deemed defamatory. But he felt that the statement it contained would only be actionable if a) it was false (which one must assume it is) and b) it was stated with actual malice.
Although the malice would be hard to prove, he warned that the domain name owner might have overstepped the mark. The disclaimer would only be visible to someone reading the content - before the site came down, possibly only temporarily - but would not be seen by someone stumbling on the site in a search.
Corynne McSherry, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that there was strong tradition of satire going over the top to make its point. While she acknowledged that the domain was "pretty dramatic" she felt that, in the final analysis, it was "pure political criticism and there's nothing wrong with that".
On their pursuit of the domain name owner, Beck's lawyers have also filed a case with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Switzerland, which handles domain disputes, arguing that the website was improperly using Glenn Beck's trademarked name. Both Levy and McSherry say this is preposterous and probably intended to flush out the identity of the domain owner. If he doesn't respond to the WIPO dispute, he will lose the domain.
For Americans fed up with Glenn Beck, the trademark issue raises a scary thought. Does Beck really intend to put his name - or face - on coffee mugs, ice buckets and Christmas tree ornaments? That has to be satire. ·
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Glenn Beck is sure trying to cover this up fast. What does he have to hide? Is he afraid that investigators will find other skeletons in his closet?
The British are obsessed with Americans, why? You have your own problems, but you seek to demean people who do not think like you do. What have Beck and Palin done to you folks.? You do not have any say in what goes on in the USA, so you must be catering to your own egos; it may surprise you that most Americans have no interest whatsoever in what goes on in the UK.
The Messiah does not seem to be helping you in any way. What did you expect? Maybe you had hoped to become an American colony, but Americans have no interest in colonization. The only foreign land they have is the land used to bury their soldiers who fought and died on your behalf; and thank God they are now taking them home if at all possible. Your society has certainly changed.
While I disagree with the tactics of this particular website, I can see the connection between that and what we see on the FOX News cable channel on a daily basis. There is little if any difference between what this website does and what that station does. Both stick out a very large spiteful lie followed by a whispered (if there is one) disclaimer.
The socialist impulse is always to slander and libel the opponent. We get it in the UK on commercial talk shows on the weekends. It stems from the fact that socialism was refuted as a viable economic system by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in his books 'Socialism' and 'Human Action' in the 1930s. The Nobel prize winning Austro-British economist Friedrich Hayek put the intellectual nails in the coffin with an economics text that was even published in Readers' Digest a decade later. Joshua Muravchik's history of socialism tells the story of the actual disaster that socialism is from the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), to kibbutzim in Israel, to Nyere's presidency in Tanzania. Socialists think that if they yell abuse long and loud all the theoretical and actual inanities of their own position will be forgotten.
If the site is down, there are a few backup domains:
http://www.didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com
http://www.gb1990.com
There are more out there, but those should work for now.
I think you miss a key point, however. While I can't speak for everyone involved, I think it's safe to say that many don't view this as an action that goes exclusively against Glenn Beck. Many view this as a kind of social commentary against the sad state of the media as a whole - an indictment of the tactics used by those who have dumbed down the level of debate. Beck just happens to be an easy target, and one that is very fun to screw with.