CNN's Glenn Beck falsely claimed William Paw gave Clinton "$200,000 in donations"

Beck falsely claimed William Paw gave Clinton "$200,000 in donations"

Glenn Beck -- apparently referring to Democratic donor William Paw -- falsely stated that Paw, who Beck said had an income of $46,000, sent Clinton "I think $200,000 in donations." In fact, according to the Federal Election Commission's donor database, William Paw himself donated $4,200 to Hillary Clinton's campaign and $11,800 to all Democratic candidates beginning in October 2005, while, according to the Los Angeles Times, the seven members of the Paw family "gave $213,000, including $55,000 to Clinton and $14,000 to candidates for state-level offices in New York." Beck's guest, American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., stated that Norman Hsu, a businessman and Clinton "bundler," is one of several "shadowy Asian figures" who have been involved with campaign finance violations associated with the Clintons.

As Media Matters documented, Tyrrell has a long history of making wild claims about the Clintons in the Spectator and in anti-Clinton books he has written, including The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After The White House (Nelson Current), which Tyrrell hyped during his appearance. Under his watch, the Spectator, once a little-known conservative monthly, used tabloid journalism to smear the former president and first lady on a regular basis with no evidence. In his October 20, 1997, "Media Notes" column, Washington Post staff writer Howard Kurtz wrote:

The magazine has been staunchly conservative since Tyrrell and [co-founder Ronald] Burr launched it while they were at Indiana University. But in recent years, as its circulation has mushroomed from 30,000 to more than 200,000, the Spectator has dived headfirst into the scandal-mongering business, fueled in part by the [right-wing philanthropist Richard Mellon] Scaife donations.

Now the magazine, which broke the "Troopergate" story, runs such pieces as "Boy Clinton's Big Mama," "The Clintons' Brewing Micro-Scandal," "Hillary, the CIA & the Iraq Cover-Up" and "Fast Times at White House High." Tyrrell himself has weighed in with two pieces on Bill Clinton's supposed ties to drug-running at the Mena, Ark., airport and another titled "Is Clinton on Coke?"