Glenn Beck vs. the Murder Meme

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Is Glenn Beck a murderer? No, of course not. But that hasn’t stopped a LOL-seeker from setting up the satirical site Glenn Beck Raped And Murdered A Young Girl In 1990.com to taunt the emotionally fragile Fox host with a dose of his own brand of argument by innuendo. As it explains: “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.”

A few weeks ago, Beck sicced his attorneys on the site and asked the Internet gods (i.e., the World Intellectual Property Office) to transfer its URL to him. In a nice twist, his lawyers alleged that the site both rips off Beck’s brand and is “plainly libelous, plainly false” and therefore “is likely to cause confusion for consumers”—presumably consumers who think Beck has set up a site to spread scurrilous rumors about himself. What Beck and his lawyers don’t get is that they’re not trying to shut down a website; they’re trying to shut down an Internet meme. And that’s why they’re about to get a steaming helping of FAIL.

The lawyer for Isaac Eiland-Hall, keeper of the offending domain, calmly lays this out in his response [PDF] to Beck’s complaint, in which he explains how the Beck-is-a-murderer meme got started. Short version: It involved a Gilbert Gottfried routine and and a Fark.com poster who, at precisely 8:32:26 PM on August 31, 2009, posed the loaded question: “Why haven’t we had an official response to the rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990?” A meme was born.

Beck may prevail against Eiland-Hall, but that won’t help him at all. By going after the murder site, Beck’s just giving new life to a one-trick idea that already has a Twitter account, a Twitter hashtag, two Facebook pages, an Encyclopedia Dramatica entry, at least two spinoff sites, and its own shorthand—GB1990. Good luck shutting all that down, even if he wins the URL battle. Before freaking out over what is essentially standard operating procedure for Internet satire, Beck might have considered whether it’s worse to have 1 site saying you’re a criminal or 10,000 saying you’re clueless.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate