In another time and place, reportage of a television comedy star publicly demanding to speak to the President of the United States about the government covering up the existence of flying saucers and then publishing a faux-interview with the President in the notoriously anti-Semitic screed The Spotlight would have been noteworthy for one thing: Reporting on the rapidly deteriorating condition of that comedy star's mental condition, his removal by the network, and his eventual hospitalization.
But what if one news network took him seriously, his network looked the other way, and The Spotlight was sourced as a legitimate news organization?
Welcome to 2009 and welcome to Fox News which today ran an article on Charlie Sheen's public demand to speak with President Obama about 9/11 (Sheen is a virulent truther)and Sheen's publication in paranoid conspiracy hawker Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet.com of a faux interview with the President. Fox's reportage can be read here: http://www.foxnews.com/....
There are a number of alarming things about this reportage, not the least of which is the decision to report on it. Unless you are a truther, Sheen's unhinged polemic is unnoteworthy, save for its novelty as an example of his illogical mind. But Fox News plays it straight, as if this were a noteworthy development. It goes so far as to direct readers to PrisonPlanet.com for further reading of the faux-interview (which is amateurishly embarrassing), and ostensibly PrisonPlanet.com itself.
For those unfamiliar with PrisonPlanet.com, it is a conspiracy website run by a one Alex Jones who sees conspiracies behind every curtain, under every bed. Alex can often be found outside ground zero, exhorting his horde of truthers to stand up to the Illuminati's latest step in its neverending path to world domination. The Bush family? Nazis. Obama? Wall Street's affirmative action puppet. Black helicopters? FEMA concentration camps? Swine flu? Global warming? Plots. Conspiracies. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Of course, eventually and inevitably, behind all great conspiracies--be they promulgated by truthers, birthers, deathers, Nazis, Fascists, Catholics, Lutherns, Islamists or Marxists--will lie the Jews, and PrisonPlanet is chock full of accusations against the Zionist-occupied planet: Israel and Mossad are behind 9/11; Israel's genocidal plans for the Palestinans; AIDS and Swine Flu are Israeli bioterror weapons; Israel's trickery in getting Americans to fight Israel's enemies; International bankers--the time-honored codewords for Jews--are enslaving us; the Federal Reserve is a Jewish cabal. And just in case you don't get the full message, PrisonPlanet will readily link you to Rense.com, or Kurtnimmo.com, both cesspools of Jew-hating. And the message board? Let's just say that Martin Luther, Joseph Goebbels and Father Coughlin had nothing on PrisonPlanet readers.
I guess the question is not whether PrisonPlanet or other fringe and/or anti-Semitic websites should exist--freedom of the press guarantees their rightful if unrighteous publication. The question is why is a national news organization and news leader which claims to speak for the mainstream--alas, the true red-white-and-blue America--plumbing the lunatic and bigoted fringe for news sources? If Fox News will source PrisonPlanet, is it that far away from sourcing Rense or Nimmo? Or has Fox News, as many have recently suspected, already started slipping down that conspiracy-slick slope, witness Glenn Beck?
Or, I ask, is it something more insidious? Is Beck's recent descent into the valley of high dudgeon, boogeymen and shadows a man losing his footing as well as his mind? Or is it a deliberate hike down that slope, a well planned reconnaissance mission for his Fox ubercommandos into the dark canyons where the Protocols of Zion, The International Jew and Mein Kampf are held up as truth? Is the question Rupert Murdoch asking, "is there a Fox audience for Jew-baiting, and will it sell in Palin and Beck's America?"