No, it wasn’t a big lie, a harmful lie, or a malicious lie that Glenn Beck told at his recent rally. Beck had claimed that he held George Washington’s handwritten first Inaugural Address “in his hands” at the National Archives, but a spokeswoman at the institution denied it: they don’t allow that. After Keith Olbermann and other full-time Beck-bashers kept pressing the issue, Beck admitted that he had fabricated the story to cut through the extraneous details of the real process:
“…Yesterday I went to the National Archives, and they opened up the vault, and they put on their gloves and then they put [the document] on a tray. They wheeled it over and it’s all in this hard plastic and you’re sitting down at a table…you can’t actually touch any of the documents, these are very very rare. So … they have it in this plastic thing and they hold them right in front of you; you can’t touch them, but then you can say ‘can you turn it over,’ and then they turn it over for you and then you look at it.”
“I thought it was a little clumsy to explain it that way,” Beck told his cable audience, shrugging off the controversy. No, as lies go, it was about as harmless as it gets.
Except.
Except that Beck told the lie as part of a rally in front of the national memorial to “Honest Abe” Lincoln, in a call to America to recommit itself to core values like honor, integrity, honesty, fairness, and trust. In his massive act of ego and hubris, standing in front of a statue of America’s greatest president, in the spot where Marin Luthor King had called the nation to fulfill its promise of equality and freedom, the very least Beck had an obligation not to do was to cynically violate the very values he was telling others to embrace. It doesn’t matter whether his lie was about holding a document, or his correct age, or his weight or his favorite color. If he was going to presume to be the spokesperson for honor and integrity, Beck had an ethical duty to at least embody those virtues for the duration of the rally. How hard could that be?
Too hard, apparently. Beck couldn’t do it. He could not avoid lying for just a couple of hours. This, of course, tells us all we need to know about his integrity, or lack of it, as well as his degree of respect for the tens of thousands of Americans who came to Washington to listen to his message. It tells us how committed he is to his own stated goals. It tells us how trustworthy he is, and how fit he is to be a role model. It was a little lie, but it tells us a lot.
America does need a leader to persuade it to reaffirm its commitment to core ethical values. Whoever it is, it has to be someone who takes the job, and the mission, more seriously than Glenn Beck.
Ethics Alarms 
To me, seems like one of the smaller violations, as I understand the facts you present. Call it artistic license, call it journalistic simplification, even call it “dumbing down” if you like. After recent discussion about how “Auto-tune” is an acceptable but deceptive practice in the entertainment industry, I anticipate that you will be using different standards for Beck under these circumstances. Is ANYONE, really ANYONE, politician especially, or politically active anchor-person in today’s day and age, going to be up for comparison to the likes of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King? Sad though it may be, I think it’s true.
I think even Bill Clinton could manage to avoid lying for the length of Beck’s rally.
That’s the point: it you are calling for honor and integrity, no lie is small enough or “white” enough. “Artistic License” is for fiction, not personal narratives…not there, not then.
PLUS, he either lied about, or had no idea why, there are two different types of stone on the Washington Monument.
Actually, his story would have been better had he said the manuscript written by our first president was so precious that no one could even touch it.
BTW: I think Shirley Sherrod is up for the comparison.
My mother once asked me, “So which half of the Washington monument did they build first?”
So, this is all you’ve got on Glenn Beck? Don’t get me wrong, it is a lie.
But is this as bad as those who call anyone a racist if they ask if Barack Obama is a natural born citizen? No.
Is this as bad as Obama saying he’s not for single payer healthcare, after he said he was? No.
Is this as bad as the BBC using old video of a house being torn down in the West Bank for safety reasons and using it as footage of a house being torn down in order to destroy a family who has links to a terrorist? No.
Does this even come close to being as wrong as when Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s most respected reporter, went on MSNBC in primetime and perpetuated the lie (even known at the time as a lie) that Sarah Palin’s song Trig was actually Bristol’s son through an incenstous relationship with her father? No.
Yet, you leap on this “story” as if it were the scoop of the year. And they say Glenn Beck lies?
And it really pales next to what the Visigoths did to Rome. And how about that John Wilkes Booth? And Clifford Irving was quite a liar!
What a ridiculous comment. Ethics aren’t comparative, and no other person’s unethical conduct makes yours, or Beck’s, better. It’s an absurd and credibility-destroying argument…”Oh yeah? We’ll he (or she) did worse stuff!” You can excuse anything that way. Do you really think it’s a rebuttal?
It’s a demonstration of cynicism and a lack of intgerity to lie at an “honor and integrity” rally. And, may I say, DUH. There’s no defense for it, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Andrea Mitchell or Barack Obama or the BBC. Obviously. I’m not trying to “get” Glenn Beck. Read the damn blog. I write about everything. That doesn’t mean I have to write about everything in ONE POST.