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

[babylonsister]

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

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

Paranoid anti-government radicals used to have to rely on crude, inefficient methods of communication. Now they have Fox News.


Imagine if Fox News had been on the air back on February 28, 1993, just months into the new Democratic president's first term, when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to serve warrants on David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound, located on the outskirts of Waco, Texas. Agents arrived because federal authorities got a tip that Koresh and the followers of the misguided messiah were stockpiling weapons.

The authorities were right. Outgunned, ATF agents quickly met resistance from the Davidians, who had a .50-caliber rifle, machine guns, and more than a million rounds of ammunition at their disposal. The shootout lasted hours and became the longest in American law-enforcement history. In the end, four ATF agents were killed, and 16 were wounded. Inside the compound, five Davidians were killed and scores more injured, including Koresh, who was shot in the hip and the wrist. The gunbattle signaled the start of a 51-day standoff between Koresh and federal authorities.

Rupert Murdoch's all-news channel didn't debut in America until October 1996, but it's chilling to consider the what-ifs of how today's Fox News lineup of doomsday, anti-government prophets would have reacted to controversial and defining news events in the early 1990s -- like Waco.

As news of the failed Waco raid broke, would Fox News' notoriously weepy and apocalyptic host Glenn Beck have broken down on the air and wept for the tyranny that he saw unfolding in the government's raid? While FBI negotiators tried to win the release of Koresh's followers, would Beck have warned viewers that the president would "take your gun away one way or another"?

Amidst the 51-day siege, would Beck have warned against the creeping "totalitarian state" inside America? Would the host have gravely announced that we'd "come to a very dangerous point in our country's long, storied history"?

Would Beck have routinely vilified President Clinton as a fascist? Would he have told viewers that he wanted to debunk the militia-movement conspiracy theory that the federal government was building prison camps, but that he just couldn't knock the story down -- and that, at first glance, it appeared to be "half true"?

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http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/137738/fox_news%27_unhinged%2C_irrational_obama_attacks_stir_up_violent_right-wing_militants/?page=entire

[K Gardner]

1. I surely fear the channel itself is a danger. Otherwise normally, intelligent people whom

I work with spew this fascist, "Obamanation" crap routinely, are hoarding ammo and guns and "living in fear". It alarms me.

[babylonsister]

2. I'm pretty alarmed myself. nt

[librechik]

3. let's see--the President was a Democrat

and they have nothing but hatred for Janet Reno today. They were trashing them then, and they still do, all about the same phony issues.