Earl Ofari Hutchinson posted an item tonight about how we should just ignore Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the others.
The Beck bashers have learned nothing from attacking Limbaugh and the Fox Network. The thing was that the more you bash, savage, pick at and ridicule a media outlet or a gimmicky talk show host you do what ad people, P.R. flacks, agencies, and sponsors drool over, and sink a mini-king's ransom into. That is to inflate, hype, and pump up a product. The product is Beck.
Obviously, I very strongly disagree with the liberal "ignore them and they'll go away" isolationist attitude. I hear it all the time: stop giving publicity to Beck and the others. While it's true that any publicity is good publicity, we ignore these people at our own peril.
Beck and Limbaugh don't need us to give them publicity -- they do just fine on their own. So to give them an extra slice of publicity is totally negligible if it means exposing the nonsense to the light of day and whittling away at the their credibility (such as it is). It's a long-term cumulative effort, and if there's one thing we can learn from these guys is that we need to remain aggressive and unrelenting. Conceding these fights for the sake of not wanting to give Beck's website a few more hits or Limbaugh's radio show a few more listeners is dangerous and weak.