On Wednesday, 11 more companies — including Mercedes-Benz, Capital One, HSBC and Discover — announced they were joining the boycott of Glenn Beck’s show on the Fox channel.

This brings the number of companies in the ad ban to nearly 60, according to James Rucker, executive director of ColorOfChange.org, the organization behind the sponsor protest. The list includes Applebee’s, Bank of America, Bell & Howell, Best Buy, CVS, DirecTv, General Mills, GMAC Financial Services, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Regions Financial Corporation, SAM (Store and Move), Travelers Insurance, Travelocity, Vonage and Wal-Mart.

The controversy began in July, when Beck appeared on Fox’s morning bobblehead show and said this:

BECK: This president I think has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture — I don’t know what it is…

BOBBLEHEAD: You can’t say he doesn’t like white people — David Axelrod’s white, Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff are [sic] white — this… more.. I think 70 percent of the people that we see every day are white. Robert Gibbs is white-

BECK: I’m not s… I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people. I’m saying he has a problem. He has a… this guy is…I believe…a racist.

The Fox bobblehead avoided mentioning the fact that Obama is as white as he is black, that he was raised by his white family in Hawaii, which, with Alaska, is as remote from African-American culture as one can be in the United States. He barely knew his African family. In fact, his all but nonexistent relationship with his African father was the subject of his book, “Dreams from My Father,” which was published in 1995.

A person with that background who was wracked by the sort of self-loathing that Beck describes would truly be twisted. He would likely have be inarticulate and anti-intellectual, a sociopathic liar, a drunken lout and even a cokehead. He would probably also be a failure in business and politics who wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming president — unless of course he happened to be the son of a former president and the brother of the governor of the state where vote counts were rigged to enable him to seize power.

Unfortunately, there is an audience in this country for Beck’s brand of race-baiting, and, predictably, his racist attack against the first black president have increased the audience for his show. Viewership on Monday, Aug. 24, was 2.8 million, 2.7 million on Tuesday and 3 million on Wednesday.

What’s driving this, of course, is the fact that, with his smear of the president, Beck has established himself as the new spokesman for American racism. Who, other than racists, would subject themselves to Beck’s ranting? It’s also key here that Fox has the oldest viewers of any cable channel. The median age of a Fox watcher is 65 years old, according to Variety. (Similarly, right-wing talk-radio listeners have a median age of 67.)

Since white people who were raised in the Jim Crow era are farm more likely to cling to racist views than younger whites who came along after schools were integrated in the 1960s, it make sense that old folks would tune in to Beck’s show in droves. Conversely, there is cold comfort in the fact that Beck’s 3 million viewers represent just 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Of course, Beck still has a few advertisers. On a recent night, they included the Amazing Water Jet, the “I Can Only Imagine Platinum” audio CD from Time Life (a sister company of CNN), 21st Century Insurance, Jewelry Exchange, Children International, Fox comedy series “Brothers,” Egg Genie, Healthcare One, DVD Bible and Hoveround.

Yes, the sponsors of the DVD Bible support America’s new racist spokesman.

When Devona Walker, an editor at the Loop, wrote about Beck and the boycott, she received this response from a reader at the right-wing site, ResistNet.com:

“You’re wrong again my black idiot… It is our purchasing power that [keeps] this country afloat. If you need to be convinced, just wait around a while more and see the corporations cater to us and not your pack of raggedy ass blacks…

“Didn’t you know that having blacks boycott a business would be a welcome relief to the business owner? Who in hell wants them around? They’re loud, crude, stupid, with I.Q.’s lower than any other race, and they have the most disgusting personalities ever.”

And Fox — the second most popular cable channel next to wrestling — continues to remain complicit in its support of Beck. Every time a new batch of sponsors bails on Beck’s show, a Fox spokesperson makes a statement like this:

“The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network so there has been no revenue lost,” a Fox spokesperson said.

The fact that Fox keeps Beck on the air is a de facto endorsement by the channel and its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, of his smear of the president of the United States. It appears that the only way for the boycott to have its intended effect is to expand it to all shows on the channel, 24/7, and then, if necessary, to other NewsCorp properties like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, just to name two.