Last night's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (5/19/11) provided ample evidence--if more were needed--of Bill O'Reilly's bigotry.

He started by trying to explain why Barack Obama is unpopular in Muslim countries:

The answer is complicated but does reflect my opinion that there is a Muslim problem in the world. The United States and the West are largely secular societies that do believe in human rights. The Muslim world is centered on religion and may Muslims believe if you don't worship Allah you are an infidel and therefore you don't deserve human rights. In fact, in certain parts of the Muslim world if you are not the proper sect of Islam, you can be persecute and even killed.

It's quite odd for O'Reilly, who has loudly complained that the "traditions of Christmas are under fire by committed secularists, people who do not want any public demonstration of spirituality" (Extra!, 5-6/05), to assert that the difference between the United States and Muslim countries is that one is secular and the other religion-centered. He went on to elaborate:

In addition, you have the Jewish situation. Because the USA supports Israel and many Muslims hate Jews, we are tarred by that hatred. It's centuries old, it's not going away any time soon. The USA has poured trillions of dollars into the Muslim world. Fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan designed to liberate those people from tyrannical governments. But apparently vast majority of Muslims are not grateful.

It's hard to know which part of that is most offensive--that Muslims are anti-Semites, or they haven't thanked us for the Iraq War.

He closed the interview segment with this:

For every Muslim in the world that wants democracy and wants human rights, there is one who doesn't. And the one who doesn't,  doesn't have any rules. And it will blow the hell out of the one that does.

One of the peculiar things about the Fox News Channel is that they actually do invite progressive guests onto some of the shows. Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/22/11), we saw Code Pink's Medea Benjamin talking about Libya. Of course, there's a political point O'Reilly is trying to make; in this case, he was contrasting Benjamin's anti-war position to the pro-war positions expressed by some Obama-friendly MSNBC hosts.

O'Reilly's got a point there. (This is not something I'm used to saying.) But never fear--he's still perfectly capable of making his own completely absurd arguments. Like this:

O'REILLY: They have succeeded in stopping a slaughter that would have happened had they not started the bombing. Correct?

BENJAMIN: Well, we don't know what would have happened. You can't tell.

O'REILLY: Well, come on, Medea, you've got to do the math. You know? You've got to do the math.

BENJAMIN: How you can know what would have happened?

O'REILLY: Based on history. Based on what had happened in the past.

BENJAMIN: Look what happened when we were going to overthrow another terrible dictator, Saddam Hussein.

O'REILLY: Yes. Look what happened? He couldn't kill anybody. We got him out of there.

BENJAMIN: We have Iraqis that....

O'REILLY: OK, that war didn't turn out well, but it did -- it did neutralize Saddam Hussein, and he couldn't murder anybody else. And that's why this action was taken.

BENJAMIN: And Iraqis now say they're worse off, with millions of them having fled the country. We unleashed...

O'REILLY: They're better off now than they were. Medea, they're much better off.

BENJAMIN: I don't think they are.

O'REILLY: You can go to Iraq and walk around. OK? You couldn't do that under Saddam Hussein.

BENJAMIN: You can't walk around very much right now.

O'REILLY: Let's get back to Libya.

If I were Bill O'Reilly, I think I'd probably want to avoid bringing up the Iraq War as a model for the Libya bombings.

On September 17, 2001, Fox host Bill O'Reilly gave his list of countries the United States should attack, including Libya:

Target three is Libya and Qaddafi. Again, he either quits and goes into exile or we bomb his oil facilities, all of them. And we mind the harbor in Tripoli. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out.

We also destroy all the airports in Libya. Let them eat sand.

A decade later, O'Reilly supports the airstrikes on Libya because Qaddafi is attacking civilians (3/21/11):

O'REILLY: But Qaddafi's carpet bombing guys who are driving around in old Chevys with pistols, he's killing them. You know he's going to wipe out the opposition. So you're not willing to go in even on that basis and stop Qaddafi from doing that?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Our intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a disaster. This intervention in Libya is not going to turn out the way you think it will. It'll be another disaster. We have to stop spending the treasure of the United States in these military adventures and start taking care of things here at home, Bill.

O'REILLY: So you are willing to be--to sit by and watch Qaddafi slaughter his opposition and you know he would.

So Qaddafi has killed people--and could have killed other people--that O'Reilly wanted to starve a decade ago.

U.S. airstrikes in Libya have brought renewed focus on the 1988 explosion of  Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Some are making the argument that the U.S. could--and should--be getting revenge for this act a mere 22 years later.

Last night (3/21/11), one cable news host said this:

Given the fact Americans died on that 747 over Lockerbie, I'm all for this mission.... I'm an American. You're an American. We all have opinions. I have always believed that Qaddafi was a terrorist. Let's look at the tape again of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Do you need any more evidence? Has Qaddafi ever proven his innocence?

Another one said this:

President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986 over a terrorist incident in Berlin where two American soldiers were killed. Two years later the Pan Am plane was blown up. So the USA owes Qaddafi payback. And you don't kill Americans and get away with it, as President Reagan said.

The first quote came from liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz, the second from Fox's Bill O'Reilly.

It is a little odd for Schultz to say he supports the Libya airstrikes "as an American" because Qaddafi hasn't "proven his innocence." Our justice system tends to see things a little differently.

As for Libya and Lockerbie, the U.S. position has long been that Qaddafi was responsible. And former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi was found guilty in a Scottish trial in 2001. Questions have long lingered over the fairness of the trial and the evidence against Megrahi.

And as Ed Herman noted in Extra! (10/09), initial reporting and speculation centered on Iran as the most likely culprit, acting in response to a U.S. attack on an Iranian airliner:

The Lockerbie case arguably begins on July 3, 1988, with the shooting down over the Persian Gulf of Iranian Air Flight 655 by the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser that was in that neighborhood helping Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.

Although 290 civilians were killed in that shootdown, the United States suffered no international sanctions or even reprimands, and Vincennes Captain Will Rogers was greeted as a hero on his return to the U.S. some months later ("Crew of Cruiser That Downed Iranian Airliner Gets a Warm Homecoming" was the New York Times headline--10/25/88). Rogers was even awarded a Legion of Merit, one of the highest military honors, for "exceptionally meritorious conduct." The shootdown was treated very benignly by the U.S. corporate media (Extra!, 7–8/88).

The bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie followed the destruction of the Iranian plane by only five and a half months, and officials and experts quickly saw Iranian vengeance as a possible motive.

Iran, of course, hasn't "proven its innocence" in the Pan Am 103 case. Would Schultz have the U.S. bomb Iran in retaliation for Lockerbie as well?

At a time when the Japanese prime minister is describing his country's nuclear crisis and the growing threat of radiation exposure as "very grave," it must have been comforting for Fox News watchers to turn on the O'Reilly Factor last night (3/17/11) to see Ann Coulter telling them that radiation is actually good for you.

Yes, Coulter told O'Reilly viewers, the evidence was right there in the media, including in the newspaper she'd once hoped would be targeted with a terror attack:

I'm citing a stunning number of physicists and from the New York Times and the Times of London, there is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.

The New York Times science section, for example, a few years ago reported on a study from Canada where all these women who had had tuberculosis got an inordinate number of chest X-rays. Their breast cancer rate was lower than the general population.

There were apartments put up in Taiwan in 1993 that accidentally contained an inordinate amount of cobalt-60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years 10,000 occupants of these buildings, being hit with five times what the government says is the minimum amount you should be hit with, the number of cancer cases they had about 10,000 occupants was only five cases.

Now, for the general population in that same age group, a group of 10,000 Taiwanese should have gotten about 170 cases of cancer.

I'm sure you'll be surprised to find that it takes minutes to debunk Coulter's scientific declarations on radiation. That "pro-radiation" Times science piece (11/27/01), for instance, does cite research finding that low-dose radiation can have beneficial effects-- only to note that it has been generally dismissed by scientists as flawed:

Now, some scientists even say low radiation doses may be beneficial. They theorize that these doses protect against cancer by activating cells' natural defense mechanisms. As evidence, they cite studies, like one in Canada of tuberculosis patients who had multiple chest X-rays and one of nuclear workers in the United States. The tuberculosis patients, some analyses said, had fewer cases of breast cancer than would be expected and the nuclear workers had a lower mortality rate than would be expected.

Dr. Boice said these studies were flawed by statistical pitfalls, and when a committee of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement evaluated this and other studies on beneficial effects, it was not convinced. The group, headed by Dr. Upton of New Jersey, wrote that the data ''do not exclude'' the hypothesis. But, it added, ''the prevailing evidence has generally been interpreted as insufficient to support this view.''

And that Taiwan study demonstrating that radioactive cobalt-60 built into an Taiwan apartment building protected the inhabitants from cancer? It contained a "major flaw" in that it failed to control for age--where a subsequent study that did control for age found an  increased incidence of cancer associated to the apartment building. As a summary of the literature on Wikipedia puts it:

In popular treatments of radiation hormesis, a study of the inhabitants of apartment buildings in Taiwan has received prominent attention. The building materials had been accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 but the study found cancer mortality rates 96.4 percent lower than in the population as a whole. However, this study compared the relatively young irradiated population with the much older general population of Taiwan, which is a major flaw. A subsequent study by Hwang et al. (2006) found a significant exposure-dependent increase in cancer in the irradiated population, particularly leukemia in men and thyroid cancer in women, though this trend is only detected amongst those who were first exposed before the age of 30.

So as an increasingly critical situation in Japan demands more accurate and useful information about radiation, the Fox News Channel's biggest show featured the ignorance of Ann Coulter. Just another reason why studies have found Fox News watchers more misinformed on the issues of the day than consumers of other corporate media outlets.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) defended the Peter King hearings on Islamist terrorism against "our friends on the left [who] are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one."

The editors argued that in fact, the focus on Muslims is justified based on the facts:

Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline. Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan's November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.

In a useful report published by the Rand Corporation last year, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that the plotters were a "diverse group" that included Caucasians, African-Americans and Hispanics as well as immigrants (or their children) from about 20 countries. Yet all but two of the plotters were Muslim, and those two sought to offer their services to al Qaeda.

So much, then, for the notion that it is bigoted for Mr. King to focus on Muslim radicalization. This is where the current threat lies.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the Rand report. The report is exclusively about Muslim radicalization and jihadism, not about domestic terrorism in general, as the WSJ would lead you to believe--if anything, it's surprising that there are any non-Muslim jihadist plotters. (The exceptions were two men who agreed for their own secular purposes to collaborate with undercover FBI informants purporting to work for al Qaeda.)

The vast majority of "homegrown" terrorist attackers--those of all ideologies who successfully carry out an attack--are not Muslim, the report finds: Of the "83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three...were clearly connected with the jihadist cause." The other jihadist plots referred to by both the report and the WSJ were disrupted by authorities--quite often because those authorities themselves helped generate them.

One key point of the report, in fact, is to say that homegrown jihadism is not nearly as big a threat as it's made out to be--exactly the opposite of the argument that the WSJ is trying to make.

"Americans are entitled to an assessment of how serious a threat this is," wrote the WSJ editors. I agree: It's about time they and the rest of the King hearing supporters (that includes you, Bill O'Reilly) stop unjustly demonizing American Muslims and present the facts.

While defending Rep. Peter King's (R.-N.Y.) congressional hearings on domestic Muslim extremism, Bill O'Reilly (3/9/11) scoffed at the notion that the biggest domestic terror threats in the U.S. come from the "radical right" and not from homegrown Muslims. After playing a clip of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok making that argument, O'Reilly responded:

Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

In reality, acts of political violence connected to the far right are a regular occurrence. To make his claim, O'Reilly even had to overlook at least two domestic terror acts apparently inspired by his Fox News colleague Glenn Beck.

In July 2010 Beck devotee Byron Williams shot two California Highway Patrol officers when they stopped him on his way, as he later told police, to kill people at the Oakland California offices of the progressive Tides Foundation and the ACLU. Byron cited Beck, who journalist John Hamilton pointed out had aired anti-Tides commentaries on 29 separate editions of his Fox News show, as an inspiration.

Furthermore, the ADL reported that Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski--who was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead--was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories he posted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents.

And how could O'Reilly forget Jim Adkisson, who shot and killed two people at a progressive Tennessee church in 2008? In his "manifesto," Adkisson wrote that he "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book." (These days, Adkisson inspiration Bernard Goldberg is best known for his regular appearances on the O'Reilly Factor.)

But there's more. What about anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph, who killed two and injured scores in bombings carried out between 1996 and 1998, including attacks at women's health clinics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics?

And far-right racist and anti-Semite James von Brunn, who took a rifle to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. in June 2009, shooting  to death a security guard before he was stopped by police?

Perhaps O'Reilly doesn't consider Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion activist who murdered women's health provider Dr. George Tiller, a terrorist. After all, before his May 2009 murder, O'Reilly and his guests had demonized Tiller in 27 separate editions of his show, with the host dubbing Tiller a "killer" and accusing him of "Nazi stuff."

On January 17, city workers in Spokane, Washington, found a sophisticated bomb set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day march. Of course, there's a chance O'Reilly hasn't heard about this; the single mention O'Reilly's network has made of the crime was in a 100-word rip-and-read (Special Report, 1/18/11) the day after the march.

Then there's also the possibility that O'Reilly and his colleagues just don't care about right-wing domestic terrorism--especially when the news might undermine Muslim-bashing congressional hearings they do care about. On Wednesday, the day before King's congressional witch hunt began, federal officials arrested white supremacist Kevin William Harpham for  attempting to use a "weapon of mass destruction" in the Spokane terror crime. To this point, the arrest has not been mentioned on Fox News.

You had to assume that there would be folks in the media who wouldn't like the recent CBS/New York Times poll that found strong public support for public workers. Sixty percent of those polled oppose stripping public workers of collective bargaining rights; 56 percent opposed cutting pay or benefits of those workers in the name of deficit reduction.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has a solution to this problem: Union households shouldn't be polled. As he explained last night (3/1/11)

And the New York Times headline today reads "Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Sector." But the poll is misleading because 20 percent of the responds say they are from union households. If you subtract them, those who favor cutting benefits win the poll. Wow, New York Times.

In case it wasn't clear, by "subtract them" he means exactly that--they shouldn't count in polls of the American public:

O'REILLY: You have a situation where you have 20 percent of the people polled being in the union families and you're telling me you can't throw that out? That that's a legitimate --

COLMES: You're saying -- yes, I'm saying that you are conflating numbers, 8 percent of people in the polls say are union members, 20 percent say they are in union families.

O'REILLY: Yes, families.

COLMES: You automatically--but you don't automatically take that 20 percent and move into it the other column.

O'REILLY: I'm not moving it anywhere. I'm just taking it out of the mix.

Following this "logic," the elderly shouldn't be polled on Social Security, blacks shouldn't be polled on civil rights legislation and Democrats shouldn't be polled on Barack Obama's job performance.

On his Fox News show Friday, self-described "union guy" Bill O'Reilly was touting the results of a new poll finding that Wisconsinites are backing Gov. Scott Walker:

According to a new poll by WisconsinReporter.com, a nonpartisan group, 71 percent of Wisconsinites believe that Gov. Scott Walker's union cutbacks are fair. 71 percent. And 69 percent of Wisconsin residents believe state workers have better benefits than private sector employees.

That finding would seem to  at odds with other polls of Wisconsin residents. But who is this "nonpartisan" group, anyway? If you go to the  WisconsinReporter.com website, the "About" page  is blank. TPMuckracker fills in the details:

The mysterious poll of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal making the rounds today was commissioned by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a conservative not-for-profit based in North Dakota and Virginia that was founded by a former Republican operative.

The Franklin Center also has ties to the some of the groups that organized a pro-Walker rally last weekend in Madison, including the Tea Party training group American Majority.

So that's "nonpartisan" in the same sense that O'Reilly is "independent."

It is bizarre to see Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly denying that pundits from her network compare people to Nazis--contrasting this reticence to Rep. Steve Cohen (D.-Tenn.), who said calling healthcare reform a "government takeover of healthcare" was "a big lie. Just like Goebbels."

In fact, such comparisons are common currency on Fox News and in much of right-wing media, as FAIR has documented (Action Alert, 1/16/04; FAIR Blog, 4/2/09,  8/9/09, 4/28/10; Extra!, 3/10). Fox's Glenn Beck, a leader in this trend, compared the auto bailout to "the early days of Adolf Hitler" (4/1/09), said that Barack Obama's plans to expand the programs like the Peace Corps were "what Hitler did with the SS"  (8/27/09) and, when Obama said he was looking for "empathy" in a Supreme Court nominee, claimed that Hitler's empathy "led to genocide everywhere" (5/26/09).

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (10/3/10), who wrote a surprisingly good book on Beck, did a count of how many times the Fox host had made various Nazi allusions:

In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24.

Yep, the particular comparison that was so outrageous it merited in-depth examination on Fox News has been made on Fox's top-rated show at least two dozen times--along with hundreds of other Third Reich references.

For an added dose of hypocrisy: Bill O'Reilly (1/20/11) had right-wing talker Laura Ingraham on last night to weigh in on, among other things, the outrageous Nazi analogies coming from the left. Ingraham has a record of--you guessed it--playing the Nazi card while criticizing the Obama administration.

How does Fox get away with such shamelessness? It's hard to explain--if I'm not allowed to mention the Big Lie theory.

Last night (O'Reilly Factor, 1/10/11), Bill O'Reillytalking to Brit Hume:

O'REILLY: We have a network, an entire network that's built around attacking Fox News and right-wing people. That's all they do at MSNBC. They have nothing else.

HUME: How's that working out for them?

O'REILLY: It's not working out for them. But it does mean that I have to have 24-hour security. That I have to worry about my children being assaulted. OK? That's what it means. You talking about nuts? These people ignite those nuts all day long.

I don't see the equivalency of talk radio. I said that there is some of that and there is. Some of those right-wing people go way overboard and they shouldn't. But I don't see the equivalent of it.

It goes without saying that O'Reilly's reading of other media is, shall we say, selective. Here' s the New York Times editorial yesterday:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman's act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.

The version as edited by O'Reilly (O'Reilly Factor, 1/10/11):

So let's begin with the New York Times. In an editorial today, that far-left newspaper said, quote, "It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced a vast majority of these death threats. Many on the right have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants or welfare recipients or bureaucrats," unquote.

That is flat out reprehensible and every American should condemn that New York Times editorial. Republicans had nothing to do with these murders in Arizona.

Which is, you know, exactly what the paper said--in the part just before O'Reilly started reading.

Last night on Fox News (12/22/10), Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly attempted to defend GOP opposition to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, which would provide health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

In his final broadcast of the year (12/16/10), Comedy Central's Jon Stewart devoted the entire show to lambasting the Republican opposition. Stewart's attention to the issue seems to have pushed other media outlets to pay attention to this issue. (With any luck, we'll remember this the next time there's a "debate" about people watching a comedy show instead of "real" news.)

Rove and O'Reilly's defense of GOP intransigence is hardly worth recounting. What was notable was their suggestion that Jon Stewart suspiciously developed an interest in this story just last week:

ROVE: But look, where was Mr. Stewart earlier this year--

O'REILLY: He didn't know about it.

ROVE: --when they weren't doing voodoo diddly squat to move this through? Where was the president of the United States?

O'REILLY: Look, look, look--you know the answers to these questions. You know the answer to these questions. They're demagoguing the issue now.

ROVE: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: Because they've squeezed it into a corner where they want to pass it tomorrow.

This is, unsurprisingly, false. Stewart did a report on the health bill in August (8/4/10), when he blasted Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the failure to pass the bill--leading him to declare about the political process,  "I give up."  You can watch it here. And send it to Bill O'Reilly while you're at it (oreilly@foxnews.com).

Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned viewers on December 3 about "a disturbing development at the FCC": Commissioner Michael Copps has been criticizing the failure of the media to provide citizens with substantive political information and discussion.

O'Reilly zeroed in on these comments Copps made in a BBC interview (12/1/10):

I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct a civic dialogue. We are not producing as much news as we did five years, 10 years, 15 years ago. We have to reverse that trend or I think we are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions.

As O'Reilly put it, "The key words from Copps are: 'We have to reverse that trend.'" O'Reilly wondered if this was a government takeover plot: "Are you going to begin calling shots here on the Factor?" Of course, FCC rules govern broadcasting, not cable news--so O'Reilly will remain free to mislead his audience for as long as Rupert Murdoch allows.

But O'Reilly allowed for one exception:

Finally, this broadcast will fight any intrusion on the media by the federal government, unless, of course, they want to put Bill Moyers in jail.

I know, I know--he's joking. But it says something about how O'Reilly's brain works that he'd invent a government intrusion on freedom of the press, and then find it amusing to crack about jailing a television journalist who isn't even on TV anymore.

Bill O'Reilly's recent "joke" about decapitating Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was only the latest example of a demented Fox News culture that permits on-air personalities to fantasize about assassination and other forms of violence against those deemed enemies of the station, its personalities or their worldview.

During the cable channel's 2008 election coverage, in what she later called an attempt at humor, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta linked Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama as people who both should be assassinated:

And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.

A week before Trotta's "joke," Republican primary candidate Mike Huckabee was apologizing for his own Obama assassination quip. Addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association, Huckabee joked that a loud thud heard backstage during his address was Barack Obama diving to the floor to avoid gun shots. Months later, Huckabee was given his own Fox News show.

With its biggest new star, Glenn Beck, Fox News hired a host well-known for on-air death fantasies--for instance, chattering about killing filmmaker Michael Moore with his bare hands and hoping out loud that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) would burn to death. In a Fox News skit in September 2009, Beck portrayed himself poisoning Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It's a culture that apparently filters down to Fox News viewers and supporters. Over the years Fox Nation, the Fox News "owned and operated" fan website, has regularly featured comments expressing the desire to see Barack Obama's assassinated.

Yesterday  News Hounds (11/8/10) published a collection of such quotes, some of which can still be read at on the Fox site. Fox Nation purports to be self-policing, to depend on readers to report inappropriate and irresponsible remarks for removal. Apparently presidential assassination fantasies fall short of Fox Nation's standards for inappropriate or irresponsible commentary.

Recent examples of these assassination fantasies on Fox Nation include comments calling for President Obama to "get what Kennedy got," for the CIA to "take this pres down" and a warning to the president that the Koran "ain't thick enough to stop a .308 round."

There is some evidence that Fox's murder fantasy culture has already helped to spark violent action.  Reporting for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton tells the story of Byron Williams, a Beck devotee who engaged in a shootout that injured two California Highway Patrol officers in July. After his apprehension, Williams told police he'd intended to travel Oakland California to kill people at the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.

In a jailhouse interview in which he described the right-wing media sources that informed his views, Williams returned again and again to Glenn Beck:

I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.

Among the things Beck did, according to Hamilton, was attack the Tides Foundation in 29 separate Fox News shows in the 18 months leading up to Williams' foiled mission to Oakland.

Moreover, as the ADL reports, Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories, he reposted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents--before he was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead.

If this all wasn't so deadly serious it would be seriously funny, because O'Reilly has spent years accusing liberal and progressive websites of fomenting hate speech. O'Reilly's crusade largely targets the comment and open forum sections of such websites, highlighting comments that generally  pale in comparison to those broadcast on Fox and posted on Fox Nation. To add to the irony, when O'Reilly is called out for failing to make distinctions between the editorial content and comment sections of these websites, he argues that the groups are responsible for everything on their websites:

Open forum is bull.... You can regulate what’s on your website.

When it comes to hypocrisy and Fox News, you really can't make this stuff up.

The hostility behind O'Reilly's creepy Milbank beheading joke was on display when the host appeared to make a veiled threat toward Milbank's boss in an appearance on another Fox show. Apparently angered that Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt permitted Milbank to publish columns critical of Fox News, O'Reilly had Fox host Megyn Kelly put a picture of Hiatt up on the screen, and told her audience:

This is the editor, Milbank's editor, Fred Hiatt. And Fred won't do anything about Milbank lying in his column. I just want everybody in America to know what the Washington Post has come to. All right, you can take Fred's picture off. Fred, have a nice weekend, buddy.

(Later in the same appearance, O'Reilly suggested that the host join him in physically assaulting Milbank: "I think you and I should go and beat him up.")

O'Reilly's veiled threat toward Hiatt  recalls one made in a recent interview with an Australian paper by Fox boss Rupert Murdoch (Australian Financial Review, 11/5/10):

People love Fox News.... We said to the cable operators when we put the price up, we said, do you want a monument to yourself....  Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down.

Perhaps the fish does rot from the head.

Fox News Channel continues to mislead viewers about the "Ground Zero Mosque."  On the August 18 broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly countered the argument that there would be no controversy over a Jewish or Christian house of worship by saying this:

 Nobody would be complaining because Christians and Jews weren't involved in the 9/11 attack. Radical Muslims were. And you may remember the Muslim world largely did not condemn the al Qaeda action, while most Christians and Jews did.

Some opponents of the Park51 development like to argue that they have no problem with Islam per se. O'Reilly seems to go the other direction; since we "may remember" that Muslims were silent after 9/11, there's something troubling about "the Muslim world."

That memory is false, though. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has catalogued numerous examples of Muslim groups immediately condemning the 9/11 attacks.

And this is an old O'Reilly line, anyway;  as I wrote in my book The Oh Really? Factor:

O'REILLY: "The telling event here is that faced with a violent faction using the name of Allah to kill civilians, Muslims the world over did little.  There were no mass demonstrations against terrorism, no peace vigils and no organized condemnation of the al-Qaida criminals.  In fact, many Muslim countries actually condoned the attacks on Sept. 11 or blamed them on 'the Jews.'" (column, 8/1/02)

 OH REALLY: There was a candlelight vigil in Iran shortly after the attacks, attended by "more than 3,000 mostly young people" (New York Times, 9/21/01).  A few days earlier (9/15/01), the Times reported that "thousands of people attending a World Cup qualifying match between Bahrain and Iran observed a moment of silence."  Palestinians gathered for a candlelight vigil in Jerusalem (Baltimore Sun, 9/15/01)  As NPR reported, "Most Arab leaders were quick to denounce the attacks. Jordan's King Hussein, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri sent their condolences.  Officials in Syria, Kuwait and other Gulf nations expressed sympathy for the American people and the families of the victims.  Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said his country was ready to send aid to the United States." (9/12/01)