Too Hot for Fox News

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

Nancy Kaszerman / Newscom The host of Fox's Freedom Watch makes Glenn Beck look like Jim Lehrer. Michelle Goldberg on the online gabfest too outrageous for the network.

In the early 1960s, William Buckley wrote a 5,000-word evisceration of the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch, in the National Review. At the time, the society was a major embarrassment for the respectable right. It called Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the same conspiracy that, according to Bircher lore, put fluoride in the water in an attempt to poison Americans.

“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points... so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked. The attack on the Birchers, he wrote later, “proved fatal over time.” After Buckley’s attack, the John Birch Society became unwelcome in mainstream conservative circles.

On the weekly, hour-long Freedom Watch, which began airing in February, Fox gives its imprimatur to the kind of rhetoric once confined to the short-wave radio broadcasts of militia movements.

That is, until recently. On July 1, John Birch Society President John McManus was a guest on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s online-only Fox News show Freedom Watch, which airs every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Their chat was friendly, ranging over the “abominable doctrine of collectivism,” the malevolent influence of “government schools,” and the fraud of manmade global warming. Napolitano seemed to be actively trying to rehabilitate the John Birch Society’s reputation. Untouchable as it once was, the group’s old-right ideology fits well with the tenor of his show, which is full of figures previously dismissed as cranks—not just Birchers but 9/11 truthers and secessionists as well.

The July 1, 2009 episode featuring John McManus of the John Birch Society

In its anti-Obama hysteria, Fox has mainstreamed voices once relegated to the fever swamps. This is most immediately clear in the apocalyptic buffoonery of Glenn Beck, and in the way the network has indulged the delusions of the so-called birthers, who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and thus can’t legally be president. Yet that’s just scratching the surface. On the weekly, hour-long Freedom Watch, which began airing in February, Fox gives its imprimatur to the kind of rhetoric once confined to the short-wave radio broadcasts of militia movements. After eight years of championing increased executive power, the network now hosts a show whose anti-government fixation sometimes leads to cheerful talk of dissolving the United States and dark warnings of impending tyranny.

Putting the show online, says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters, gives Fox the “best of both words. They can really feed the far right all this paranoid stuff, but even folks at Fox realize they can’t go quite that far on TV.”

On the Internet, with fewer people paying attention, they’re willing to go quite far indeed. On March 18, for example, Freedom Watch did a joint broadcast with the prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—or, as Napolitano introduced him, “the one, the only, the great Alex Jones”—so that the show aired simultaneously on the Fox News Web site and on Jones’s radio program. It was an extraordinary collaboration, because Jones is best known as a leader of the 9/11 Truth movement. In his documentary 9/11: The Road to Tyranny, Jones argued that the attacks on the World Trade Center were orchestrated by the U.S. government as a pretext for the “power-mad megalomaniacs” of the New World Order to “usher in their corrupt world government, a world government where populations, their own documents show, will be herded into compact cities, will be issued national ID cards, and yes, even implantable microchips.”

View as Single Page