When Does Free Speech Become Hate Speech?

When can you, as an television executive, tell a television personality, "No, seriously. STFU. You're endangering lives and we don't want this kind of heat on us"? You'd think that Fox News - part of a multinational media superconglomerate - would play a little more conservatively around this guy. After all, he doesn't have any real advertisers anymore (of course he got angry about that and took it out on Van Jones. Who, according to him, is some sort of communist child molester or something).



But I wonder what would happen if we did the same thing with him? If we took his words out of context and then inflamed them with some secret code-language to say that the things that he is really saying are not what he is saying, but that he's alluding to something quite sinister and dire. He has an atomic bomb in his pants, and when he takes a dump, our water supplies will become radioactive. We will all become mutated zombies, ready to fight for his Emperor Hitler Zorg.

photo © 2010 stef niKo | more info (via: Wylio)

Achtung! Babies!

But would it really matter? Not that his detractors don't have a propensity for being gullible or prone to violence. But will it illustrate anything other than what his followers believe all along: Beck is God.

Post-note:
I'm thinking we need to catalog what people like Beck are saying and what effect it is having in the real world. REal neat-like. Charts and graphs and pictures and numbers and lines and all that presentable presenting stuff.

And then we need to present that to News Inc's stockholders.

Somebody give me a chalkboard.