Glenn Beck's new target: Mark Lloyd

Move over Van Jones. There's a new enemy in town. His name is Mark Lloyd, and conservative critics are mad as hell that he's working in the Obama administration.

"Fresh off the ousting of former special assistant for 'green jobs' Van Jones, Glenn Beck supporters are calling for the public lynching of FCC Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd," writes Examiner columnist Clifford Bryan.

Beck put out the call on his Twitter page with this ominous posting: "Watch Dogs: FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER. Do not link before burning to disc." 

Beck complains that Lloyd has a problem with capitalism and conservative media outlets and quotes a statement Lloyd made in a 2007 article: "The progressives of today should take a page out of FDR's media playbook" from when the New Dealers were battling conservative print media and a conservative Supreme Court to "fix the great debacle of American capitalism."

But Lloyd's article merely supported the views expressed by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to promote as many media outlets as possible by preventing the consolidation of media in too few hands. Lloyd even quotes Justice Black in the article that the First Amendment of the Constitution "rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." 

What's so controversial about a free press? In the eyes of Glenn Beck, it's another example of Barack Obama's tyranny.

As for Beck's other two targets, something else is at work here. Cass Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor appointed by Obama to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Carol Browner is a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and currently assistant to the president for energy and climate change.

Taken together, the three names -- Lloyd, Sunstein and Browner -- reflect some of the right-wing's biggest fears: diversity, regulation and environmental protection. They also provide convenient targets to accuse President Obama of appointing so-called "czars" to run the government. Never mind that these officials don't actually run the government and not one of them carries the actual title "czar." That's a media fabrication cooked up by people like Beck.

What makes Lloyd stand out, though, is that he's an African American official who is little known in the general population, much like Van Jones before last week. Beck and conservatives may see Lloyd as a proxy for the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright to prove to their followers that Barack Obama is actually a closet radical, despite the fact that the president has already disappointed the far left of his own party with a moderate record in governing.

Lloyd's critics also cite a paper he co-authored, called The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, when he worked as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank that conservatives despise.

But Lloyd is more than a caricature the right wants to make him out to be. His actual title is associate general counsel/chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission and he formerly served as vice president for strategic initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, another group not too popular with the right-wing of the GOP.

A graduate of the University of Michigan and Georgetown University Law Center, Lloyd is not only a communications lawyer, but also a former broadcast journalist who worked as a reporter and producer at NBC and CNN. And for two years he served as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That puts him well in the mainstream of American institutions, but to hear Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin and other conservative critics, you'd think he was the second coming of Jeremiah Wright.

Or at least that's what they hope to make him.