Fox News' Unhinged, Irrational Obama Attacks Stir up Violent Right-Wing Militants

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted April 22, 2009.

And that's the chilling significance of what's now unfolding. Last week, I wrote about the inherent dangers and irresponsibility of Fox News consciously shaping itself into a kind of militia news outlet and how it's impossible to ignore the anti-government message some viewers such as Richard Poplawski, the man accused of shooting and killing three Pittsburgh police officers, might be taking from Fox News.

But let's take a step back and see just how extraordinary Fox News' latest lurch to the revolutionary right really is. And let's clearly understand how Fox News is actively trying to mainstream fringe allegations, how Murdoch's outlet functions as a crucial bridge -- a transmitter -- between the radical and the everyday.

What Fox News, and specifically Beck, is doing in early 2009 is giving a voice -- a national platform -- to the same deranged, hard-core haters who hounded the new, young Democratic president in the early 1990s in the wake of Waco (i.e. the Clinton Chronicles crowd). What Fox News is doing today is embracing the same kind of hate rhetoric and doomsday conspiratorial talk that flourished during the '90s, and Fox News is now dumping all that rancid stuff into the mainstream. It's legitimizing accusatory hate speech in a way no other television outlet in America ever has before.

Today's unhinged, militia-flavored attacks from the right against Obama are clearly reminiscent of 1993 and 1994 and the kind of tribal reaction conservatives had to the Democratic White House. What's different this time around is that that it's being adopted and broadcast nationally by Fox News, as it proudly mainstreams and validates the fringe.

Back in the early 1990s, marginal critics, militiamen, and so-called "Patriots" had to rely on somewhat crude methods of communications to spread their conspiratorial distrust of government. They used grassroots fax networks, the very early days of online bulletin boards, and even passed around copies of The Turner Diaries. At the top of their media pyramid were right-wing talk-radio hosts as well as the writers on The Washington Times' and The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, who eagerly disseminated the culture of partisan paranoia.

But in terms of television, the most influential mass medium in America, nowhere on the TV landscape in the early 1990s were rabid government haters able to hear their message of fear amplified on a nightly or weekly basis the way Obama haters are able to today via Fox News. Even Rush Limbaugh, who from 1992 to 1996 hosted a syndicated television show, didn't go there. Limbaugh's purely partisan television program avoided describing the new Democratic administration with the same doomsday language that's now casually thrown out about Obama: that he's a Marxist or a fascist, or that totalitarian rule remains a real and imminent threat. Even Limbaugh (or his producers) thought that kind of rhetoric was too much for American television.

Fast-forward two administrations, and that kind of talk has become Fox News' signature.

To be accurate, there was one person with a national television audience back then who did regularly promote outlandish conspiratorial claims about Clinton: the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He actively pushed the now-infamous Clinton Chronicles documentary on his Old Time Gospel Hour television show. The Clinton Chronicles, which was produced by Citizens for Honest Government, which in turn paid off key Clinton critics who cooperated with the house-of-mirrors film, claimed that the new president had accumulated a long criminal record while governor of Arkansas and continued his lawbreaking ways as president, that the Clintons were associated with drug-running, prostitution, murder, adultery, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, just to name a few.

Playing that hypothetical card again today, is there anyone who doubts that if Beck were broadcasting on Fox News back in 1994 that Citizens for Honest Government reps would have been ushered onto his program to discuss Clinton's alleged depravities? I don't doubt it, simply because Beck has, at times, become the voice of the militia this year -- and the militia devoured The Clinton Chronicles. As author David Neiwert, an expert on the right wing, reported, "The militia movement provided most of the early audience for The Clinton Chronicles; large stacks of the books and videos sold well at Patriot gatherings."

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