During a weekend of Republican attacks on Senator Barack Obama’s personal associations, Fox News Channel ran a program Sunday that made provocative assertions about similar connections, called “Obama & Friends: The History of Radicalism.”
Sean Hannity, the conservative radio and television host, was the host of the hourlong program, which raised, among other things, unsubstantiated accusations that Mr. Obama’s work as a community organizer in Chicago was “training for a radical overthrow of the government.”
The statement came from Andy Martin, a conservative writer and frequent political candidate who is credited as being among the first — if not the first — to assert in a chain e-mail message that Mr. Obama was secretly a Muslim.
Mr. Obama is a Christian; his campaign says he “is not, was not and has never been” a Muslim.
Peppering his statements with phrases like “in my opinion” and “my view is,” Mr. Martin said Mr. Obama’s political career had been engineered by Bill Ayers, a founder and former member of the radical Weather Underground and now an education professor in Chicago.
Various reports, including ones in The New York Times, have found no evidence that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers were particularly close, although they have had various points of contact. Mr. Ayers was host of an event for Mr. Obama early in his political career, they served together on a charitable board, and both worked on an educational project financed by the billionaire philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg.
The program was the latest step in the evolution of opinion journalism on cable news. It comes as one of Fox News’s rivals, MSNBC, becomes increasingly liberal, with hosts like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann advocating against Senator John McCain. But Mr. Hannity’s program on Sunday was notable in presenting partisan accusations against Mr. Obama in a journalistic, documentary format in prime time.
Saying he believed that ties between Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers were deeper, and reporting that Mr. Ayers had been an admirer of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who, in turn, is an acolyte of Fidel Castro, Mr. Martin said, “If you love the Cuban revolution and Castro, and if you love what’s happening in Venezuela with Hugo Chávez, you’ll love Barry Obama — Barack Obama, as he calls himself — in the White House.”
For good measure, Mr. Martin, who made a failed bid to run on the Republican line in the 2004 race for a Senate seat from Illinois that Mr. Obama won, added, “We are basically going in the throes of a social revolution which attempts to essentially freeze out anybody who is not part of this radical ideology.”
The special was shown on “Hannity’s America,” the Sunday night program in which Mr. Hannity does not have to share the screen with his weeknight liberal co-host on Fox News, Alan Colmes.
Mr. Hannity said that Mr. Obama did not respond to a request for comment. Still, the program presented no opposing viewpoint to the program’s thesis: that, in Mr. Hannity’s words, “Obama’s list of friends reads like a history of radicalism.”
Mr. Hannity’s executive producer, John Finley, said that the program was clearly opinion and that the audience — on average 1.5 million to 2 million — knew to take it as such. “ ‘Hannity’s America’ is an opinion show — it’s a show from Sean’s perspective, which is obviously conservative,” Mr. Finley said.
Speaking of Mr. Martin, he added, “It’s one man’s opinion, one of many that was expressed on the show.”
Mr. Martin said he was careful not to present his theories about Mr. Obama as proven fact.
“That is my opinion — expert opinion — if you will,” Mr. Martin said of his commentary on Mr. Hannity’s program. “I don’t pretend to be an exclusively fact-based reporter, though I try as hard as I can to get the facts.”
Mr. Martin came under strong attack from liberals on Monday. Many noted that the Republican Party of Florida decided against backing his bid for the State Senate in 1996 after receiving documents from his Congressional race 10 years earlier in Connecticut listing the purpose of one of his political committees as “to exterminate Jew power in America and to impeach the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City.”
Mr. Martin had previously said the documents were forged, and again denied their authenticity on Monday. He also denied harboring anti-Semitic sentiment, saying “it’s peripheral, it draws you away from the issue.”
And when confronted that this guy that Sean Hannity gave an hour long forum to was a Andy Martin, virulent anti-semite, well, Hannity went ballistic.
Talking over your guests is a common FOX tactic but he made a good point. 1 that Walter Annanberg, a Reagan ambassador and a friend to Reagan also sat on this board. And ironically his widow now supports McCain. And as Alan Colmes states in the piece, the board included both Democrats and Republicans as well as William Ayers. But McCain Palin would have all of us believe that this board was some hotbed of anti-American radicalism.
So Obama, sititing on a panel with democrats and Republicans which included William Ayers, a political figure in Chicago education and politics can be tarred with associations but Sean Hannity who invited a guy on a show specifically designed to promote this smear that he agrees with isn't an anti-semite?
But I thought if you sit with someone, you have to agree with everything they're ever said and done in their life!
But wow! So FOX hosts an hour long smear piece with absolutely little to no facts, just b.s. from some anti-semite who has made all sorts of racist and just outright kooky allegations in the past.
This is the Republican Party in the 21st century. It's sad really. What do you say when right wing radicals and racists call you radical and racist?
