NAACP, NEA also sent letters on behalf of AT&T merge, just like GLAAD - suggests a pattern

This is bad news for GLAAD. It suggests that AT&T may have bought influence with these organizations via its donations. This would confirm, if true, the worst fears of the critics - that one of our top groups was bought off by a private company. Coming on the heels of GLAAD President Jarret Barrios' admission that his previous letter to the FCC, was not a fake - he'd previously claimed it was - this now establishes a pattern of behavior within GLAAD with regards to AT&T, as well as a pattern of behavior by AT&T with the liberal organizations to which it donates.

Let's examine this further.

January 2010, GLAAD President Jarret Barrios writes the FCC, asking them to remove from their Web site a letter that GLAAD sent to the FCC about Net Neutrality.  GLAAD says they don't know where that letter came from, it's not theirs:

"The signature is not in my hand.  I have never seen this letter and it is not my signature."

Then yesterday we heard a second version from GLAAD's president:

Barrios: Well over a year ago. It was like January of 2010. And it, it sort of supported the telecom industry's position on Net neutrality, which was not GLAAD's position. And, in fact, GLAAD, at the time and still, doesn't endorse bills and doesn't endorse regulatory actions. So, it would have been impossible for us to do that. After an investigation, we determined that it was an administrative error, internally at GLAAD, and I'll own that, and we withdrew the letter. At the time we withdrew the letter, we didn't know that, so I was -- you can imagine reading a letter in a public submission with your name on it that you had never seen -- and it wasn't your signature -- after we did an internal investigation, we realized it was an internal error, an administrative error.

FOF: So somebody just, like, managed to, hack -- get access to your letterhead, or what happened?

Barrios: No, no, no, it was an administrative issue and it was, you know, a personnel issue that was managed and, obviously, it was a personnel issue, so I dealt with it.

A personnel issue that was managed? That sounds like some staffer screwed up, and was punished for it. That's not what we're hearing today.

Today, after several days of silence on this issue, GLAAD admits that they know the letter, they wrote it - on behalf of AT&T.

The letter's origins lay with AT&T; the telecom giant sent Barrios suggested wording for another letter to the FCC. Barrios' special assistant used the language verbatim to create the letter, signed his name to it, and sent it in.

Barrios recounts that he was at an airport when his assistant called him to go through some items on his agenda. In a hurry to board his plane, when she told him that "they" wanted him to send in the letter to the FCC, Barrios assumed he needed to resend his first letter again. He authorized her to send the letter without any oversight.

Now we're told that Barrios simply misunderstood what the letter was. Why didn't he say that yesterday? Yesterday he was saying that it was an "administrative" error and the employee had been dealt with. That's not the same thing as saying, "I didn't realize what the letter was, it was a simply screw up."

All around, this is very bad.  Especially considering AT&T had betrayed our community (and showed little remorse) only one week before GLAAD sent the latest later.

As an aside, I'll bet AT&T thought they could get away with helping Tennessee repeal our civil rights, while not lifting a finger to help us stop it.  AT&T was wrong.  It's payback time.