Michelle Malkin tries to get retraction of union lie spread by tweeter blogdiva and the Naples News web to no avail

Stupid lie of the week: Fox News people are hypocritical AFTRA members!

By Michelle Malkin  •  February 25, 2011 01:02 PM

This moronic attack started percolating on the blogs and Twitter over the past week:

Fox News hosts and contributors including Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, yours truly, and others are greedy, union-bashing hypocrites who are card-carrying members of AFTRA.

Here’s a typical rant:

“FOX talking heads are all card carrying union members. Funny, they don’t mention it. They are members of “The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.” Union representing professional actors, dancers, singers, and broadcasters. (AFTRA) Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin…….are members of AFTRA yet do not want teachers to have the right to collective bargaining?”

And here’s another:

Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox fools have been whipping up the fear, because liberal rallies are always bad things and full of terrorists and terrorist appeasers and verging on violence (as opposed to conservative rallies which are Patriotic and Free Speech and Constitutional and Freedom and Liberty and yada yada.)

Anyhoo, yesterday Beck told the protestors their unions “are anti-western way of life,” which is the kind of thing people like Beck say: it’s just an insult attached to a group they don’t like (Nazi, communist, terrorist, leech, etc. + liberals, Democrats, Muslims, the poor, etc.), then regurgitated without any thought whatsoever. It’s intellectually lazy, but it gets the job done, and frankly with their audience, no more is required. “This group = bad thing.” Whatever. It’s boring.

I just want someone to ask Beck one thing: aren’t you a member of a union? AFTRA? American Federation of Television And Radio Artists? The same AFTRA campaigning to save Public Broadcasting? Beck’s name is listed on the Los Angeles chapter’s June 2010 ballot under “newsperson.” Maybe there’s another newsperson named Glenn Beck, to which I have to say: dude, I feel sorry for you.

If Glenn Beck is a card-carrying AFTRA member, then he needs to either tear up his union card or STFU about how unions are anti-Western civilization.

I am not an AFTRA member and never have been in the decade I’ve been with Fox. Neither is Beck. And neither are many of the other FOX News personalities being accused of “hypocrisy” (another empty charge given that AFTRA is a private sector union that is not subsidized with taxpayer funds).

Nevertheless, the meme spread across Twitter and morphed from speculation to assertion. On February 17, I confronted one of the liars:

My request for correction was met with silence.

The little lie spread into a mainstream publication.

On Feb. 23, on the Naples News website, a blogger headlined his piece: